Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Individuals with Down syndrome have differences in how their brains form that cause intellectual disability. Down syndrome or trisomy 21 is the most common genetic cause of intellectual and developmental disability and is caused by the triplication of chromosome 21.
A newly funded project will combine the expertise of four Waisman Center investigators to develop advanced machine learning methods for studying brain organoids, three-dimensional cell clusters grown from stem cells that closely mimic key aspects of human brain development.
At a Glance A newly discovered protein marker on the surface of a retinal cell could help pave the way for cell therapies that restore vision in people with currently incurable forms of blindness. Research in the lab of Waisman investigator David Gamm, MD, PhD, professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of …
A University of Wisconsin–Madison interdisciplinary team led by Waisman Center investigator Xinyu Zhao, PhD, has received funding through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF)-supported Igniting Interdisciplinary Innovation (I³) initiative to develop new methods for manufacturing and analyzing human neural organoids, miniature three-dimensional models of the human brain grown from stem cells. This multidisciplinary collaborative project, “Scalable Manufacturing and …
The electrical properties of a neuron paint a picture of its development and function. A new user-friendly and accessible tool developed at the Waisman Center allows scientists to analyze the electrical activity of individual neurons – rather than clusters – using a process known as spike sorting. The free tool is available online for other researchers to access.
A new review paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience from Bhattacharyya, associate professor of cell and regenerative biology, pulls together what is currently known about DS’s impact on brain development.
Matt Zammit, PhD, Waisman scientist in the Brain Imaging Core, and affiliate investigator Erik Dent, PhD, are both winners of UW-Madison’s Cool Science Image Contest.
After more than two decades at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin and several first-in-the-world stem cell scientific breakthroughs, Su-Chun Zhang, MD, PhD, professor of neuroscience and neurology, is retiring. He came to the Waisman Center in 2001 as part of the Translational Research-Neurodegenerative Diseases Cluster. Zhang anchored Waisman’s stem cell research program and has …
To the naked eye, they look like tiny blobs free floating in a pink liquid. Under a light microscope, they look similar. But organoids, a 3-D mini version of an organ grown in a lab, may contain invaluable information about how the human brain develops.
It is well established that brain development looks different for individuals with Down syndrome, but how early do these differences appear?
