RESEARCH PROJECTS
Our Current Focus
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EARLY LIFE STRESS RESILIENCE
Each of us responds differently to stressful situations. While some of us are able to recover quickly and efficiently (resilient), others take longer to recover (susceptible). One of the first goals of the lab is to study the effect of candidate pathways identified by a transcriptomic analysis on early life stress resilience. We want to understand if and how different pathways bring about these behavioural differences in response to stress.
In the longer term, we are interested in how these factors themselves are regulated and to identify master regulators of these behavioural differences.
NEURODEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS
A large fraction of neurological disorders stem from defective neurodevelopment. While we understand the contribution of ion channels to brain functioning and hence, to these disorders, the contribution of processes like gene expression and protein synthesis to disease development and manifestation is less understood. Recently, several chromatin factors are being identified to play a role in development, and mutations in these factors have been shown to result in disease. We make and use zebrafish mutants of some of these factors involved in gene expression and its regulation in order to understand their contribution to disease.