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Redirecting glial progenitor fate to rebuild the injured Brain

Objective

Over a million different cell types and billions of connections underlie brain function. While the embryonic brain glial progenitors generate this cellular diversity, in the adult brain progenitor competence becomes restricted to generation of few cell types. Thus, any attempt to repair the brain requires knowledge of the rules governing fate decisions within a damaged environment. We have shown that injury activates an inflammatory transcriptional signature in glial progenitors leading to exit from a dormant state. Excitingly, our recent data indicates that injury leads to demethylation of developmental enhancers in these glial progenitors too. In the regenerating zebrafish, activation of enhancers drives a transcriptional regenerative program. Yet, in rodents, despite enhancer demethylation by injury, transcription of a developmental program is missing. The overall goal of this project is to envisage ways to efficiently commission enhancers to re-direct lineage choices of glial progenitors towards re-establishing brain function following injury. Recent technological breakthroughs, including clonal lineage tracing, genome editing, and single cell “omics” combined with mouse genetics and injury models will allow (i) analysis of fate choices in the naïve and injured CNS (ii) study of how the chromatin landscape impacts transcriptional modulation of cell identity (iii) to finally design an integrated manipulation of the epigenome, transcriptome and environment for directed brain repair by endogenous progenitors.
We follow a multidisciplinary approach combining cutting edge technology in functional genomics, developmental biology and translational research and leverage on a set of cutting-edge experimental platforms established in my lab and validated protocols that have led to exciting preliminary discoveries.
We will provide fundamental knowledge on the mechanisms underlying lineage-decisions of CNS progenitors and open new research lines for treating CNS disorder

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2017-COG

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Host institution

DEUTSCHES KREBSFORSCHUNGSZENTRUM HEIDELBERG
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 2 000 000,00
Address
IM NEUENHEIMER FELD 280
69120 Heidelberg
Germany

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Region
Baden-Württemberg Karlsruhe Heidelberg, Stadtkreis
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 2 000 000,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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