Impairment of Neural Cell Functions During Developmental Insults

The research interest in our laboratory is based on the identification of different stem and precursor cell pools in the CNS that are critical for identifying ideal transplantable cells for therapeutic cell replacement approaches or are targets for insults leading to developmental pathologies.

Our laboratory is focused on understanding the impact of a number of such insults to these stem and progenitor cell populations during CNS development. The insults that are under investigation represent:

• Genetic insults
• Nutritional insults during gestation
• Inflammation and viral infections
• Exposure to environmental toxicants

For each of these insults we established novel animal model systems and used our expertise of stem cell and progenitor biology to discover and define cellular targets and mechanisms of impairments.