Marco Hefti
University of Iowa, IA·Neuroscience
Tau is a protein best known for forming toxic tangles in Alzheimer disease. It also drives faulty brain wiring in childhood conditions, including brain injury from oxygen and blood-flow loss around birth (hypoxic-ischemic injury) and its common later effects, epilepsy and autism.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
tau
neurodevelopment
dendritogenesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- Determine whether tau's interaction with NMDA receptors, signaling channels at nerve connections, is needed for human neurons to mature and grow dendrites, using tau knockout human neurons.
- Test the role of human tau's unique N-terminal insert in neurodevelopment, including its interaction with fyn kinase, an enzyme that boosts NMDA receptor signaling.
- Define a normal, human-specific developmental function of tau to help set a safe window for tau-reducing therapies in neurodevelopmental disorders.
More about the research
Drugs that lower tau levels have been developed for Alzheimer disease and are safe in adults. They could perhaps be adapted for these developmental disorders. But tau has been preserved across all mammals, which suggests it does something useful. Before tau-lowering drugs can safely be given to a developing brain, researchers need to know what tau normally does there.
Why it matters
Children with epilepsy, autism or early-life hypoxic-ischemic brain injury might one day benefit from tau-lowering drugs first developed for Alzheimer disease. Knowing whether tau is needed for normal brain development would help define when reducing tau is safe. This knowledge is needed before such therapies could move forward for these lifelong conditions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Determine the role of NMDA receptors, glutamate-sensing receptors, in corneal nerve maintenance and regeneration by conditionally deleting them in sensory nerves or in Schwann cells, the nerves' support cells, in mice.
Olga Chechneva
University of California-Davis, CA·Neuroscience
Identify which neurons receive material from satellite oligodendroglia during brain maturation, using spatial transcriptomics to profile single SOL-neuron nuclear pairs in the developing mouse cortex.
Hyung Nam
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-Shreveport, LA·Neuroscience
Determine how chronic alcohol lowers neurogranin, a synaptic protein that tunes glutamate signaling, in the mouse medial prefrontal cortex, and test tolerance in mice with mPFC-specific Ng knockout or overexpression.
The school
University of Iowa: 32 labs on PI Pages, $703M a year on research, 418 research doctorates a year.
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