Event:

Brain development is a tremendously complex process in which a myriad of neuronal and non-neuronal cell types is generated and assembled into functional circuits in a highly organized manner. Many psychiatric and neurological disorders arise when developmental processes are perturbed by various genetic and environmental factors. Given high cellular diversity in the brain, for most neurodevelopmental disorders, we are still far from understanding how they arise and what types of neurons and circuits underlie brain functional impairments. Recent technological advance in single-cell analyses allowed us to address how neurodevelopmental risk factors perturb brain development at single-cell resolution. In my presentation, I will show recently published and unpublished data from my lab, where we implemented single-cell analyses to trace how neuronal subtypes and their networks are perturbed during brain development, targeting key periods of brain development. I will demonstrate how patient-derived human brain data should be integrated with animal models to uncover mechanisms that are directly relevant to human disease. Finally, I will present functional experiments we use to validate our single‑cell observations and discuss how these findings can be translated toward clinical applications.