Marnie E. Halpern, Ph.D.

Research

One of the questions my laboratory has been studying is how differences are established between the left and right sides of the developing brain. In fish, amphibians and reptiles, the dorsal most region of the diencephalon, the epithalamus, exhibits notable left-right asymmetry in structure and in gene expression. Such differences also affect neural connections onto the midbrain target and, presumably, influence behavior. We have been performing screens to identify the genes that control asymmetry of the brain and we have developed methods to perturb laterality. We are also working on in vivo methods to visualize neural connections in the brains of altered and normal individuals. In other work, we have been generating new transgenic lines to monitor fluorescently labeled cells in the living brain, such as myelinating glia, or to perturb specific subregions by localized cell ablation.