The UNC School of Medicine has awarded the 18th Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize to Winrich Freiwald, PhD, of The Rockefeller University and Doris Y. Tsao, PhD, of the California Institute of Technology for the discovery of brain mechanisms of face recognition.

Freiwald and Tsao will visit Chapel Hill on April 12 to receive the prize – a $20,000 award – and give a lecture on their work at 3 p.m. in room G202 in the Medical Biomolecular Research Building (MBRB).

In a new study published in Cell Stem Cell, UNC School of Medicine neuroscientist Juan Song and colleagues discovered a long-distance brain circuit that controls the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. This story is featured as the Cover Story in the current issue of Cell Stem Cell.

Anton Lab Researchers pinpoint signaling problems in the progenitor cells crucial for proper neuron generation and organization.

As part of a five-year, $7.5 million award, UNC researchers led by Joseph Piven, MD, will follow up on innovative imaging studies to create interventions to help children with autism.

The axon guidance cue netrin-1 and its receptor DCC promote axon branching in developing cortical neurons. In this study, we detail a novel molecular mechanism by which the brain-enriched E3 ubiquitin ligase TRIM9 orchestrates multimerization of DCC, requisite activation of FAK and Src family kinases, and increases in exocytic vesicle fusion, all during netrin-dependent neuronal morphogenesis. We are the first to show that non-degradative ubiquitination of a receptor alters kinase activation and signaling pathways during morphogenesis.

Microcephaly is a hallmark of Angelman syndrome (AS), a debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder that results from loss of function of the HECT domain E3 ubiquitin ligase, UBE3A. However, until recently, the underlying causes of slowed brain growth in individuals with AS had gone unstudied, resulting in significant gaps in understanding of the pathogenesis of the disorder.

An antenna-like structure on cells, once considered a useless vestige, appears to be important for proper brain development in mammals and when impaired can cause defects in the brain’s wiring similar to what’s seen in autism, schizophrenia, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. In lab experiments, UNC School of Medicine scientists prevented these wiring defects by restoring signaling though these antenna-like structures called primary cilia.

The study was published on August 7, 2017 in Developmental Cell.

The Cohen Lab and NC State researchers team up to reverse TDP-43 protein aggregation, a hallmark of degenerative diseases.

In the study published July 6th in the journal Neuron titled, “Network-level Control of Frequency Tuning in Auditory Complex”, Kato et al. found a neuronal network basis for how our brain precisely represents the external world.

Anne Marion Taylor’s lab receives an American Heart Association grant to further their research investigating how axon damage causes synaptic remodeling following stroke