The Department of Biology is excited to invite you to a seminar entitled “On the Surface … Transmembrane Protein Codes that Direct Synapse Formation and Function in the Brain” by Dr. Timothy Mosca, Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Thomas Jefferson University on Monday, February 16th at 3pm in BL234. We kindly ask you to make every effort to attend.

Host: Dr. David Chen

More information about the speaker here: https://www.jefferson.edu/academics/colleges-schools-institutes/skmc/departments/neuroscience/faculty/faculty/mosca.html

Abstract: With over 80 billion neurons, the diversity of neuron types and functions in the brain is truly staggering. This has long suggested there may not be a single developmental strategy to produce that many different neurons, but this question has remained largely unanswered across multiple evolutionarily diverse systems. The Mosca Lab uses the powerful genetic model system Drosophila melanogaster to study how brains form, how connections between neurons develop, and how different classes of cells function in comparison to one another. In recent years, we have built a suite of genetically encoded pre- and postsynaptic labels in the brain that allow us unprecedented access to the synaptic connections in the brain. For the first time, we have been able to make quantitative maps over time of individual cells in the brain, allowing us to craft the blueprints for how development occurs normally so that we have a baseline from which to assess when neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric, or even neurodegenerative diseases disrupt brain formation. In this lecture, I will highlight our recent work mapping development in the brain that uncovered excitingly unexpected differences in developmental strategies used by different classes of neurons or even the same class of neurons but from males to females. I will also highlight some of our recent work to understand the molecular basis for such differences, which has united our developmental studies with an examination of genes identified to be connected to autism spectrum disorders.