Join us for the upcoming Biological Sciences seminar (February 18 2022) with Dr. Timothy Mosca (title: “Synapse maturation and neurodegeneration: two sides of the same incredibly complicated coin?”

Featuring:

Dr. Timothy Mosca, Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Vickie & Jack
Farber Institute for Neurosciences, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, USA

JOIN THE TEAMS MEETING HERE

Website:

https://www.moscalab.org
https://www.jefferson.edu/academics/colleges-schoolsinstitutes/skmc/departments/neuroscience/faculty/faculty/mosca.html

February 18th, 2022 at 12h00-13h00 EST via Microsoft Teams

Outline:

The exquisite series of events that underlies synaptic
organization in the brain requires a symphony of
molecular players that coordinate to achieve multiple
goals. Synapses must find their correct target, make initial
connections, and then importantly, allow those
connections to undergo maturation to become robust and
reliable functioning adult synapses. Though considerable
work has studied the mechanisms underlying synapse
formation, we know far less about the events between
formation and adult function, namely, synapse maturation.
This represents the time in which protein cascades take a
synapse from a nascent to a full-fledged connection. In
the Mosca Lab, we study the molecular mechanisms of
how synapses mature. In this seminar, I will discuss the novel molecular mechanisms involving
receptor cleavage that we’ve discovered to promote synapse maturation and discuss how we
think these mechanisms serve as a bridge between neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration.
By studying and learning how maturation occurs, we can more deeply understand how
neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric, and even neurodegenerative diseases go awry when the
basic steps of synapse development fail to occur properly.