mental illness
Creative Minds: Mapping the Biocircuitry of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder
As a graduate student in the 1980s, Bruce Yankner wondered what if cancer-causing genes switched on in non-dividing neurons of the brain. Rather than form a tumor, would those genes cause neurons to degenerate? To explore such what-ifs, Yankner spent his days tinkering with neural cells, using viruses to insert various mutant genes and study their effects. In a stroke of luck, one of Yankner’s insertions encoded a precursor to a protein called amyloid. Those experiments and later ones from Yankner’s own lab showed definitively that high concentrations of amyloid, as found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, are toxic to neural cells [1].
The discovery set Yankner on a career path to study normal changes in the aging human brain and their connection to neurodegenerative diseases. At Harvard Medical School, Boston, Yankner and his colleague George Church are now recipients of an NIH Director’s 2016 Transformative Research Award to apply what they’ve learned about the aging brain to study changes in the brains of younger people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, two poorly understood psychiatric disorders.
Tags: aging brain, Alzheimer’s disease, amyloid, bipolar disorder, brain, brain imaging, FISSEQ, fluorescence in situ sequencing of RNA, induced Pluripotent Stem cells, iPSCs, mental illness, NIH Director’s 2016 Transformative Research Award, REST, REST gene, schizophrenia, transcription factor
NIH Family Members Giving Back: Kafui Dzirasa

Caption: Kafui Dzirasa (front center) with the current group of Meyerhoff Scholars at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Credit: Olubukola Abiona
Kafui Dzirasa keeps an open-door policy in his busy NIH-supported lab at Duke University, Durham, NC. If his trainees have a quick question or just need to discuss an upcoming experiment, they’re always welcome to pull up a chair. The donuts are on him.
But when trainees pop by his office and see he’s out for the day, they have a good idea of what it means. Dzirasa has most likely traveled up to his native Maryland to volunteer as a mentor for students in a college program that will be forever near and dear to him. It’s the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Since its launch in 1988, this groundbreaking program has served as a needed pipeline to help increase diversity in the sciences—with more than 1,000 alumni, including Dzirasa, and 270 current students of all races.
Posted In: Health, Science, Training, Tribute
Tags: diversity, Langston Hughes, mental illness, mentoring, mentors, Meyerhoff Scholars Program, neurobiology, neuroscience, training, underrepresented minorities, volunteerism, volunteers
Creative Minds: A Transcriptional “Periodic Table” of Human Neurons

Caption: Mouse fibroblasts converted into induced neuronal cells, showing neuronal appendages (red), nuclei (blue) and the neural protein tau (yellow).
Credit: Kristin Baldwin, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA
Writers have The Elements of Style, chemists have the periodic table, and biomedical researchers could soon have a comprehensive reference on how to make neurons in a dish. Kristin Baldwin of the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, has received a 2016 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to begin drafting an online resource that will provide other researchers the information they need to reprogram mature human skin cells reproducibly into a variety of neurons that closely resemble those found in the brain and nervous system.
These lab-grown neurons could be used to improve our understanding of basic human biology and to develop better models for studying Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and a wide range of other neurological conditions. Such questions have been extremely difficult to explore in mice and other animal models because they have shorter lifespans and different brain structures than humans.
Tags: 2016 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, addiction, aging, aging brain, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, autism, brain, brain cells, dopamine, fibroblasts, human neurons, iN cells, induced Pluripotent Stem cells, iPSCs, mental illness, neurobiology, neurology, neuronal subtypes, neurons, nicotinic receptors, serotonin, The Periodic Table, transcription factors, wellderly