News


A new study of aging and schizophrenia reveals synchronized gene expression in astrocytes and neurons.

Postdoctoral researcher, Emi Ling, published her work on “A concerted neuron-astrocyte program declines in ageing and schizophrenia” in Nature. Ling et al. analyzed the prefrontal cortex of 191 human donors by single-nucleus RNA-seq of postmortem brain tissue samples pooled together in “villages.” We found a striking relationship between cortical neuron […]

Schematic of a neuron and astrocyte

Khalid Shakir featured in #WhyIScience Q&A Broad news story

In a recent #WhyIScience Q&A Broad news story, principal software engineer, Khalid Shakir, shares his journey from tinkering with spare equipment in his parents’ high school classrooms to pioneering large-scale computational tools, his passion for emerging technologies like AI, and the invaluable role of affinity groups like A4C in fostering […]

Khalid Shakir sitting on chair in office building

New project aims to map cellular variation in the healthy human brain

Steve McCarroll and lab alumnus, Evan Macosko, were interviewed by the Broad News team about their recently awarded grant from the NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Their grant aims to create an atlas of human brain cell variation and to better understand what generates that variation. […]

Steven McCarroll and Evan Macosko

Naturally chimeric marmosets present opportunities for autism research

Research presented by Ric del Rosario and lab alumna, Fenna Krienen at Neuroscience 2022, the largest neuroscience conference, was recently showcased by Spectrum, a news outlet for autism research. Ric’s work on microglia chimerism in marmoset brains and Fenna’s work on generating a marmoset brain cell atlas outline new ways […]

Fenna Krienen presenting her poster

New neuron type discovered only in primate brains

Krienen et al. used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to profile RNA expression in 188,776 individual interneurons across homologous brain regions from three primates (human, macaque and marmoset), a rodent (mouse) and a weasel (ferret). They found that an interneuron type that was previously associated with the mouse hippocampus—the ‘ivy cell’, which […]