Julia Ganz
Michigan State University, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
The gut has its own nervous system, often called the brain in the gut, which controls digestion and nutrient absorption without instructions from the brain. Building it requires assembling nerve cells and glial cells into working circuits during development.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Genetics
Biology
- Topics
enteric nervous system
neurogenesis
zebrafish
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Determine the molecular mechanisms that drive region-specific production of enteric neurons, comparing how nerve cells arise in different subdivisions of the gut such as the stomach versus the intestine.
- Identify region-specific gene regulatory programs in the enteric nervous system using epigenomic and transcriptomic profiling to detect candidate control elements, then test those elements functionally.
- Test whether selected transcription factor genes, the master switches of gene activity, are required for neuron formation in specific gut regions, using a CRISPR genome-editing pipeline in zebrafish.
- Characterize how developing gut neural circuits interact with surrounding gut tissues, linking neuron generation to the development of the organ around it.
More about the research
Which genes direct that assembly is largely unknown, and so is a more basic question: does the stomach build its nerve circuits using the same genetic instructions as the intestine, or does each gut region follow its own program?
Why it matters
Knowing which genes generate each type of gut neuron is a prerequisite for understanding how these cells control digestion and gut motility, and for interpreting disorders in which gut nerve cells are missing or misdeveloped. The findings could eventually inform efforts to regenerate or repair enteric nerve circuits, and the project directly trains undergraduates in genome editing and independent research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amy Sater
University of Houston, TX·Biology
Test how retinoic acid, a vitamin A-derived signal that patterns the embryo from head to tail, triggers the start of glial cell formation in the front region of the developing spinal cord of Xenopus laevis embryos.
Serge Przedborski
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Evaluate whether virus-delivered anti-α-Syn single-chain antibody fragments (scFvs) improve gut function and reduce gut pathology in transgenic L61 mice, which overproduce alpha-synuclein, using GI function tests and tissue analysis.
John Rubenstein
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Identify genes that differ across time and region in the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) using enhancer-CreER mouse labeling and single-cell RNA-seq, and study Nfia/b/x and Tcf7l2 mutant mice.
The school
Michigan State University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 555 research doctorates a year.
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