Aging Brain Seminar with Magdalena Götz, PhD
Description
Mechanisms of neurogenesis and neural repair
We study the mechanisms of neurogenesis in order to implement them for neuronal repair. I will present unpublished work about novel molecular mechanisms important for neurogenesis in the developing murine cerebral cortex and will then turn to using these for direct neuronal reprogramming after traumatic injury of the adult murine cerebral cortex in vivo. I will discuss different viral vector approaches and up-date on a recent breakthrough in direct glia-to-neuron reprogramming achieving high efficiency and mature neuronal subtypes sending out long range projections. I will close by discussing the integration of replaced neurons into the circuitry of the adult murine cerebral cortex, that normally does not integrate new neurons at adult stages and present unpublished data about the mechanisms regulating this integration. Taken together, our knowledge about basic mechanisms of neurogenesis allowed making great strides towards neuronal repair.
Speaker Bio
Magdalena Götz studied Biology at the university of Tübingen and did her Diploma and PhD work in the lab of Jürgen Bolz at the FMI in Tübingen on the mechanisms of how input connections to the cerebral cortex form during development as well as how specific neuronal subtypes are specified. She received the Otto-Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society for this work. She then moved to the National Institute for Medical Research in London to use retroviral vectors for clonal analysis in the lab of Jack Price and identified mechanisms delineating neighboring forebrain regions. She then started her own lab at the Max-Planck Institute for Neurobiology where she made the breakthrough discovery that radial glial cells are neural stem cells. This inspired her to attempt turning also adult mature glial cells into neurons already in 2002 in vitro and in 2005 in vivo. In order to determine which glial cells best to convert to neurons after traumatic brain injury she systematically examined the roles of distinct glial subtypes after traumatic brain injury when she was appointed Director of the Institute of Stem Cell Research at the Helmholtz Center Munich in 2004 and Chair of Physiological Genomics, now at the Biomedical Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Martinsried Munich. This led to the discovery of a novel role of reactive astrocytes and the in vivo direct neuronal reprogramming reaching a very high efficiency and maturity. Magdalena Götz became a member of EMBO in 2006, of The Leopoldina Academy in 2008 and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 2017. She received the Familie Hansen Price and the Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz Price of the DFG in 2007, followed by many other awards such as the Ernst Schering Price in 2015, the Roger de Spoelberch Prize in 2017 and the Schellenberg Prize in 2018.