Eva S Anton
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
The cerebral cortex, the brain's wrinkled outer layer, must be built with the right number and types of neurons, placed correctly and wired together. When this goes wrong, it can lead to an unusually small or large brain, a smooth brain lacking normal folds, epilepsy, schizophrenia or autism.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
cerebral cortex
corticogenesis
brain development
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Discover how the developing mouse cortex maintains the balance between radial progenitors and intermediate progenitors, the stem-like cells that set neuron number and type, using cell-type-specific genetic models, live imaging and lineage tracing.
- Define how primary cilia, antenna-like signaling structures on cells, guide the growth and connectivity of cortical projection neurons, using optogenetic and chemogenetic control of cilia signaling and mapping of their signaling partners.
- Determine how human mutations linked to neurodevelopmental disorders alter progenitor balance or neuronal wiring to cause cortical malformations, using functional testing and single-cell genomics.
More about the research
Yet the molecular rules that steer cortex construction remain largely unknown.
Why it matters
Malformations of the cortex underlie disorders such as microcephaly, lissencephaly, epilepsy, schizophrenia and autism. By defining how progenitor balance and cilia-guided wiring go wrong, and testing patient mutations, this work could give clinicians a framework for linking genetic changes to brain malformations. In the future, this may support better diagnosis and new treatment ideas.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna La Torre
University of California-Davis, CA·Neuroscience
Map how microRNA expression and the messenger RNAs they target change over time in cortical radial glial progenitors, using miR-eCLIP to capture miRNA–target pairs.
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.
Helen Willsey
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Determine how SYNGAP1 gene dosage affects cilia formation and Hedgehog signaling in human neural progenitor cells before synapses form, and how this changes their proliferation and differentiation.
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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