SSP Forum: Sergiu Pasca on Building the Brain

Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460), Room 126

Photo of Sergiu Pasca

The
Symbolic Systems Forum
presents

How Does the Human Brain Build Itself?

Sergiu Pasca
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department

Tuesday, January 24, 2023
4:30-5:20 pm
Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460), Room 126

ABSTRACT:

A critical challenge in understanding the programs underlying development, assembly and disease of the human brain is the lack of direct access to intact, functioning human neural tissue for detailed investigation and manipulation. In my talk, I will first describe how my laboratory has been leveraging instructive signals to develop, starting from human pluripotent stem cells, self-organizing neural organoids resembling specific domains of the nervous system. I will next introduce a self-organizing cellular preparation named an assembloid that we created to model cell migration and circuit in the developing human nervous system. Lastly, I will illustrate how organoids and assembloids can be used to study development, evolution and to model genetic neuropsychiatric disease both in vitro as well as in living systems. 

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