Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Understanding the brain using evolution, viruses, and barcode sequencing.

Our research aims to understand the structure and function of the brain. To do so, we take a comparative approach and develop molecular, viral, and sequencing technologies to measure neuronal connectivity and gene expression at high resolution and throughput in disease models and in a wide range of vertebrates, ranging from humans to sharks. We have developed the first barcode sequencing-based approaches to map neuronal connectivity, increasing throughput of single-neuron mapping by orders of magnitude and opening the door to single-cell comparative connectomics. We complement this connectivity mapping by in situ sequencing of barcodes and endogenous genes to understand how new brain regions evolve, how brain connectivity changes to support new behaviors, and to understand the effects of drugs of abuse and neurodevelopmental disorders on brain structure. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, residing at the interface of neuroscience, synthetic, evolutionary, and developmental biology, genomics, virology, and computational biology.