Jiakun Chen
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
The brain is not just neurons. Its most abundant support cells, astrocytes, grow into extraordinarily intricate shapes, sprouting huge numbers of fine branches that touch essentially every other cell type in the central nervous system.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
astrocytes
glia
astrocyte morphology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Define how the phospholipid ligand for the Tre1/S1pr1 receptor is regulated in neurons versus astrocytes to direct astrocyte fine process outgrowth, using genetic, chemical and in vivo live-imaging approaches in zebrafish.
- Determine how signaling through the G protein-coupled receptor Tre1 is controlled within astrocytes to shape their morphological growth and function, using the genetic toolkit of Drosophila.
- Test how neuron-to-astrocyte signaling refines astrocyte morphology, combining Drosophila and zebrafish and manipulating the phospholipid-degrading enzyme Wunen/LPP3 in neurons.
- Assess how changes in astrocyte morphological complexity alter neural circuit activity and function in zebrafish, linking astrocyte shape to neuronal output.
More about the research
Those contacts are what let astrocytes keep the brain's chemical environment stable, help wire the nervous system during development, and tune the activity of neural circuits. When astrocytes fail to build or maintain that complex shape, problems follow: such defects have been implicated in Alzheimer's disease, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Yet how an astrocyte acquires its shape in the first place is still poorly understood.
Why it matters
Astrocytes support and modulate the circuits that underlie thought and behavior, and faulty astrocyte shape has been linked to Alzheimer's disease, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Defining the signals that build astrocyte architecture would supply a mechanistic baseline for interpreting those links, and could eventually point to the cell types and molecules worth targeting when astrocytes go wrong in human disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Scott Laughlin
Stony Brook University, NY·Neuroscience
Develop pro-fluorescent lipid tracers, similar to DiI and DiO, that become fluorescent only after reacting with an activator, to label chosen neuron populations in fixed post-mortem brain tissue.
William S Talbot
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Determine how newly identified positive and negative regulators of myelination control the wrapping of nerve fibers by oligodendrocytes during development, neural plasticity and remyelination, using zebrafish genetics and cellular analysis.
Deborah J Andrew
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biology
Map the molecular steps by which Hedgehog signals through the GPCR Tre1 to guide migrating germ cells in Drosophila embryos, from receptor binding to actin polymerization.
The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
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