Author: lrrowley

Childhood stress leaves lasting mark on genes

How does stress put some children at risk of psychiatric disorders when they grow up? To find out, researchers compared their genomes to those of kids whose childhoods were relatively tranquil.

John Svaren, PhD – Slide of the Week

Our goal was to define the genetic cause of the profound hypomyelination in the taiep rat model and determine its relevance to human white matter disease.

Masatoshi Suzuki, DVM, PhD – Slide of the Week

Human induced-pluripotent stem cells are a promising resource for propagation of myogenic progenitors. Our group recently reported a unique protocol for the derivation of myogenic progenitors directly (without genetic modification) from human pluripotent cells using free-floating spherical culture.

Meet the new director: Qiang Chang, PhD

A cutting-edge scientist and a family chef as well as a former professional chess player…meet Qiang Chang, the next director of the Waisman Center! Qiang Chang, a professor of medical genetics and neurology and Waisman Center investigator, began his tenure as the next director of the Waisman Center on July 1. The transition to center …

Audra Sterling, PhD – Slide of the Week

This study compared gesture use in young children with DS and TD as well as how mothers respond to child gestures based on child age and diagnosis.


Finding the perfect click to measure hearing loss

Click. Click. Click. What’s that sound? It’s Waisman Center investigator Sriram Boothalingam exploring ways to develop more comprehensive and reliable hearing tests. To test for several types of hearing loss, audiologists use a small earphone to introduce sounds – like clicks – into the ear. Then they monitor for sounds, called otoacoustic emissions, that the …

Kristin Shutts, PhD – Slide of the Week

How does social information affect the perception of taste early in life? Does mere knowledge of other people’s food preferences impact children’s own experience when eating? In Experiment 1, 5- and 6- year- old children consumed more of a food described as popular with other children than a food that was described as unpopular with other children, even though the two foods were identical.

Lawrence D. Shriberg, PhD – Slide of the Week

Genetic investigations of people with impaired development of spoken language provide windows into key aspects of human biology. Over 15 years after FOXP2 was identified, most speech and language impairments remain unexplained at the molecular level.

Study offers first look at how children with cerebral palsy develop language skills

A new study of children with cerebral palsy could help ease the speech and language challenges many of these children face as they get older.

Krishanu Saha, PhD – Slide of the Week

We present and characterize a robust method for rapid, scarless introduction or correction of disease-associated variants in hPSCs using CRISPR/Cas9. Utilizing non-integrated plasmid vectors that express a puromycin N-acetyl-transferase (PAC) gene, whose expression and translation is linked to that of Cas9, we transiently select for cells based on their early levels of Cas9 protein.