Jan Slabbaert
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Education
2016, University of Leuven – KU Leuven, Belgium. PhD.
Interests
Describing brain function remains challenging as little is known about how neuronal stem cells give rise to the extraordinary variety of neuronal subtypes and their assembly into complex neuronal circuits. Knowing the lineage of all neurons would allow identification of neuronal cell types in the brain and provide insight into the lineage-specific transcriptional signatures that drive more complex processes such as neuronal circuit formation.
The revolution in next generation genome engineering and sequencing technologies (CRISPR-Cas9, single-cell mRNA-sequencing) has paved the way for a new generation of high-throughput lineage tracing methods. Pioneering work has demonstrated that CRISPR can be used to sequentially mutate synthetic target arrays in the genome as cells divide. These mutations accumulate throughout development and convert the array into derivate lineage barcodes. RNA or DNA sequencing of the lineage barcode is then used to read and decode the lineage information of entire organisms.
My work focuses on neuronal development in the Drosophila visual system as a model to further develop and create CRISPR-based methods capable of reconstructing the entire lineage trees of this brain structure at single cell resolution. The optic lobe is molecularly and morphologically well characterized, its lineages are invariant and it develops in a highly modular and repeated manner. These characteristics facilitate not only the reconstruction of high-resolution lineages, but also allow us to use classical genetics to validate our findings and benchmark our methods for future use in less characterized or more complex systems.