Event Details:
Stanford Neurosciences Institute Seminar Series Presents
Tracking neural stem cell fate in vivo, one cell at a time
Hongjun Song, Ph.D
Professor,Institute for Cell Engineering, Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University
Host: Marius Wenig
Abstract
Santigao Ramon Cajal famously deemed the mature central nervous system as a place where “everything may die, nothing may be regenerated”. Studies in the last decades instead have revealed tremendous plasticity of the mature brain. Probably, the most striking form of structural plasticity in the adult mammalian brain is continuous generation of new neurons in discrete regions through a process named adult neurogenesis. Adult neurogenesis arises from neural stem cells within specialized niches and is regulated by various experience. Using adult mouse as an experimental model, my laboratory has been addressing basic questions related to adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus. In particularly, we have been developing “single-cell” technology to investigate adult neural stem cells and neurogenesis in vivo. I will present results from our latest studies on revealing transcriptome landscape of adult neurogenesis from single-cell RNA-sequencing and dynamic properties of adult neural stem cells from clonal analysis. In addition, we have been using single-cell technology to address fundamental questions in developmental biology.