Minghong Ma
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
People with schizophrenia often have a poor sense of smell and changes in the olfactory epithelium (OE), the tissue in the nose that detects odors. Strikingly, smell deficits track with the so-called negative symptoms, such as lost motivation and pleasure, and with problems in social thinking.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
- Topics
schizophrenia
olfaction
olfactory epithelium
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2029
What they work on
- Test whether olfactory epithelium inflammation or smell-neuron inactivation from adolescence to adulthood alters prefrontal pyramidal neurons in mice, using patch clamp recordings, and reverse effects with chemogenetic activation of olfactory-prefrontal circuits.
- Measure how olfactory epithelium perturbation changes prefrontal activity, including olfactory cortex inputs, using fiber photometry, a light-based neural recording method, during mouse tasks of motivation and social recognition.
- Compare olfactory-prefrontal functional connectivity in mice, measured by in vivo electrophysiology, with healthy humans scanned by resting-state functional MRI to evaluate cross-species similarity.
More about the research
They do not track with hallucinations or delusions. No one yet knows how the nose could influence higher brain functions. This project proposes that nerve pathways from the smell system to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a brain region for planning and social behavior, provide the link.
Why it matters
The negative symptoms and social thinking problems of schizophrenia currently respond poorly to treatment. Showing that pathways from the nose's smell tissue to the prefrontal cortex contribute to these symptoms could point to new ways to understand them. It may also help identify new targets for treating them in schizophrenia and related disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kevin Franks
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
Test whether piriform cortex neurons jointly encode olfactory bulb input and breathing phase, by delivering brief optogenetic light pulses to different olfactory bulb spots timed to respiration in awake, head-fixed mice.
Bradley Goldstein
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
Map the axes of gene-expression variation across human olfactory sensory neurons by single-cell RNA sequencing of nasal biopsies from people with normal smell and from people with objectively measured smell loss.
Stephen Liberles
Harvard University, MA·Neuroscience
Pinpoint where the NPY receptor NPY5R acts to let hunger boost attraction to food odors, testing whether it works in PVT-projecting piriform cortex neurons, using Cre-based Npy5r knockout and rescue mice.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.