Molecular Neurobiology

The assembly of a fully functional nervous system, with all its diversity and complexity, depends on the coordinate generation of both neurons and glia from differentiating multipotent neural stem cells in the developing embryo. The progression of this differentiation process is associated and controlled by changes in gene expression programs that need to be very tightly regulated. For the moment we are mostly interested in understanding how such regulation takes place at the transcription level, by focusing our studies on the role played by various transcription factors in neurogenesis.