Advancing knowledge of human development, developmental disabilities, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Genotypes are strongly associated with disease phenotypes, particularly in brain disorders. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind this association remain elusive.
There are thousands if not millions of steps to get from genotype, your genetic code, to phenotype, your physical attributes.
In a lab near UW Hospital, Megan Jandy grows stem cells from people with Down syndrome — 10 batches of cells, most in three-dimensional clusters, each batch featuring one group with the extra chromosome that causes the disorder and one group without it.
Tiny but mighty is a good way of describing our genome – the collection of our DNA. Although not visible to the naked eye, the human genome holds around 21,000 genes and millions of DNA variants, containing the information needed to maintain an organism throughout its life.
Like a game of Wheel of Fortune, where you have to fill in missing letters to guess the hidden phrase, analyzing data sometimes requires estimating missing data points by relying on available information in order to get the full picture of what’s being studied.
Our machine-learning framework, brain and organoid manifold alignment (BOMA), first performs a global alignment of developmental gene expression data between brains and organoids.
Today, many researchers are using brain organoids – miniaturized and simplified versions of organs produced in a dish typically from stem cells – as analogs for studying the development of the human brain.
Four Waisman Center investigators will dig deeper into the function of genes implicated in autism and brain development with support from the prestigious Simons Foundation 2022 Pilot Award.
Waisman Center researchers are creating a new approach to study how changes to brain development in the womb result in intellectual disability in people with Down syndrome.
Could Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia be biologically connected?
