Junyue Cao
Rockefeller University, NY·Neuroscience
Even adult brains keep making some new neurons, a process called adult neurogenesis. It helps keep the brain stable and working normally.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Genetics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
adult neurogenesis
Alzheimer's disease
aging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Develop sciNext1000, a high-throughput, low-cost single-cell genomics method, and use it to profile four million cells from post-mortem human hippocampus to measure adult neurogenesis in aging and Alzheimer's disease.
- Identify isoform-level gene activity features (different RNA versions of the same gene) linked to impaired neurogenesis in aged and Alzheimer's human hippocampal samples.
- Develop sci-Div-seq, a single-cell technique that improves detection of newborn neurons, to trace differentiation paths and gene programs of adult neurogenesis in young and aged mouse brains.
- Apply high-throughput spatial transcriptomics, which maps gene activity within intact tissue, to identify cell interactions and local niche signals that regulate neurogenesis in human and mouse brains.
More about the research
When it goes wrong, it has been linked to aging and to Alzheimer's disease (AD). Studying it is hard because the cells involved are extremely rare, sometimes less than 0.1% of brain cells. Most current single-cell methods, which measure gene activity in individual cells, cannot process enough cells to find them.
Why it matters
Understanding why new neuron formation declines in aging and Alzheimer's disease could point to therapeutic targets that trigger neurogenesis. Such targets might restore healthy cell populations in older adults and people with neurodegenerative diseases. The new low-cost, high-throughput single-cell methods could also help other researchers study rare cell types.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Stefano Fusi
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether adult-born granule cells in the dentate gyrus support sparse memory encoding that enables pattern separation, combining neural recordings in mice with computational modeling.
Kyle Hewitt
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Genetics
Define how Samd14, a gene switched on during anemia, supports c-Kit signaling and survival of red blood cell precursors, using primary human and mouse cells.
Haiqi Chen
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Genetics
Map ligand–receptor interactions, where signaling molecules bind receptors on neighboring cells, between human spermatogonial stem cells and their niche using spatial transcriptomics on intact testis tissue sections.
The school
Rockefeller University: 6 labs on PI Pages, $305M a year on research, 38 research doctorates a year.
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