Weissbourd Lab
Principal Investigator: Brandon Weissbourd
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Regenerative abilities are widespread, suggesting deeply conserved roles in biology. However, these abilities vary dramatically across species: understanding conserved and novel mechanisms enabling varying degrees of regeneration has important implications for regenerative medicine. An enduring medical challenge is the ability to regenerate extensively damaged nervous systems. This presents unique problems, bridging fields and levels of analysis, from the molecular mechanisms of neural development to the neural activity dynamics driving behavior. Here, we propose to study fundamental principles linking neurodevelopmental processes to the functional organization of neural circuits to ask how they could enable network-scale regeneration. Our strategy is to use a new animal model, Clytia, that is small, transparent, and capable of regenerating entire genetically ablated neural subnetworks. This affords a novel, high-resolution platform to study regenerative processes at their interface with systems-level organization. In preliminary work, we used whole-animal calcium imaging and single-cell RNA- sequencing (scRNAseq) to identify intermingled subnetworks with distinct functional organi…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01NS141960-02: Mechanisms of Network-Scale Neural Regeneration in a New Neuroscience Model (2026)
- 5R00NS119749-05: A New Animal Model to Examine Nervous System Function Development and Regeneration (2025)
- 1R01NS141960-01: Mechanisms of Network-Scale Neural Regeneration in a New Neuroscience Model (2025)
- 5R00NS119749-04: A New Animal Model to Examine Nervous System Function Development and Regeneration (2024)
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