Center for Cellular & Molecular Neuroscience

The Center for Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience is based in the Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy, and also includes members from across departments and colleges at Drexel University (and other institutes in Philadelphia), with the shared mission of elucidating the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the development and functioning of the nervous system as well as diseases, disorders and injuries of the nervous system.

Representative whole mount immunostaining images of assembloids with phenotypes and morphologies relevant to the study of frontotemporal dementia. Source: Liang Qiang Lab.

RESEARCH AREAS

Neuronal cytoskeleton
Microtubule and actin regulation
Molecular motor proteins
Hereditary spastic paraplegia
Human induced pluripotent cell derived in vitro and ex vivo models
Gulf War Illness
Tau and tauopathies
Protein degradation and autophagy
Neuronal migration
Neurite outgrowth
Neuronal polarity

Axonal and dendritic development
Autism spectrum disorders
Spinal cord injury
Traumatic brain injury
Axonal transport
Extracellular signaling
Spine and synapse formation
Miller-Dieker and 17p13.3 duplication syndrome
Neurodevelopmental disorders
Astrocyte diversity, development and modulation of synapses

Experimental model systems

Primary cultures of rat and mouse neurons
Mouse models for diseases of the nervous system and other transgenic mouse lines

Human induced pluripotent cell derived neurons and cerebral organoids
Neuronal cell lines

Growth cone from a 3-day old rat hippocampal neuron in culture, expressing fluorescent actin (in purple) and fluorescent microtubule end-binding protein EB3 (in blue).

Figure Legend: Growth cone from a 3-day old rat hippocampal neuron in culture, expressing fluorescent actin (in purple) and fluorescent microtubule end-binding protein EB3 (in blue). The EB3 appears as comets traversing through the growth cone. (Shrobona Guha and Peter Baas)

Experimental approaches

Live-cell imaging, including calcium imaging
Immunocytochemistry and immunohistochemistry
Standard molecular biological approaches including Western Blotting, RT-PCR, site-directed mutagenesis, etc.
Single-cell RNA sequencing
Proteomics
Behavioral analyses on mice and rats