LATEST NEWS

5-28-25 Congratulations to inaugural Krienen lab undergrads and Class of 2025 NEU majors Minal Patel and Ruqaya Kareem, who defended their excellent senior theses and graduated this week! Ruqaya is off to medical school at the University of Toledo and Minal is spending a gap year in India before applying. We'll miss you both!

And welcome to Dr. Dede Setiawan, who joined our lab as a Senior Veterinary Research Associate!

1-14-25 Transitions! Our OG lab manager Jess Feliciano transitioned to a faculty assistant role at PNI. Jess Schembri takes over as Krienen lab manager. Congratulations Jess^2!

10-18-24

(Belated) happy 2nd birthday to the lab, and welcome new members Jess Schembri and Victor Nieto Caballero, Phd rotation students Ning Wang & Zachary Zemmel, and undergrad Pavle Acimovic!

10-14-24

New collaborative award to study the role of cerebellar and thalamocortical circuits in bipolar disorder!

We are excited to join forces with Jen Pan (Broad Institute), Yang Dan (HHMI/Berkeley), Shaun Purcell (Mass General Brigham), and Xin Yu (MGH) to reveal genetic and circuit mechanisms that underly sleep disturbances in bipolar disorder. We have a postdoc position available to work on this project - please get in touch if interested.

We're grateful to BD2 for their support!

10-14-24

New preprint led by Margaret Schroeder!

Astrocytes exhibit a curious degree of heterogeneity across development, brain structure, and species. Read about our collaboration with Guoping Feng's group to characterize this enigmatic class of cells.

Explore the expansion microscopy data here and snRNA-seq data for marmoset and mouse!

10-08-24

Fenna receives an NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2)!

Read about our project to reconstruct the developmental history of modifications to primate brain cell types.

Why are human brains so big and slow (to develop)? Illuminating to work with the brilliant Feline Lindhout, Madeline Lancaster, and Katie Pollard on this perspective on specializations in human brain development:

A molecular and cellular perspective on human brain evolution and tempo

Editorial:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02022-3

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Primate layer III pyramidal neurons in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex express high levels of calcium-related genes such as CACNA1C and CALB1. Why? In this collaboration with Amy Arnsten and Dibs Datta, we combined snRNA-seq with immuno-EM, physiology and pharmacology to localize key channels on layer III dendritic spines and that both low and high L-type calcium channel activity negatively modulates delay cell firing. Paper here:

doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1112

Very fun collaboration with Ric del Rosario and Steve McCarroll to address a curious quandary: do marmosets swap brain cells with their siblings?

paper out in eLife!

Sibling chimerism among microglia in marmosets

read a nice feature here:

https://oxsci.org/marmosets-swap-brain-cells-with-their-twin/

and perspective here:

Genetic chimerism: marmosets contain multitudes

BRAIN Initiative Cell Census publication package is out!

The suite of 21 papers are born out of the coordinated efforts of the BICCN consortium focuses on documenting cellular diversity of human and nonhuman primate brains.

Coverage of our paper by MIT's McGovern News

Allen Institute coverage of the package

NYT

Economist

Link to all 21 papers:

https://www.science.org/collections/brain-cell-census

Link to our marmoset cell census paper in Science Advances:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk3986

Goodbyes, hellos, and the lab turns 1!

08-09-23

We bid farewell to our beloved inaugural lab member Sunny, who will pursue his MD at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Welcome to PNI rotation student, Yongqi Wang!

And the lab celebrated our first birthday, with tie dye

Fenna receives a 2023 Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship!

07-06-23

The Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Awards in Neuroscience supports early career investigators engaged in basic or clinical research that may lead to a better understanding of neurological and psychiatric disorders. The fellowship awards promote high-risk, and potentially high-reward, projects. Aimed at advancing cutting-edge investigations, the awards are presented to highly promising, early career scientists. The Krienen lab's project will focus on reconstructing the developmental basis of cellular innovations in primate brains.

Krienen lab (PNI) & Mallarino lab (Mol) jointly awarded an Eric & Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technologies Fund

05-05-23

Read about the collaborative project here!

A versatile toolkit for in vivo genome editing in non-traditional mammal species

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New lab members!

05-04-23

Siting He, Postdoc

Reilly Nakamoto, Research Specialist

Lakme Caceres, Research Specialist

Oliva Taylor, Undergrad

Ruqaya Kareem, Undergrad

(image credit, Sunny Mudhar/midjourney)

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NEW PREPRINT!

10-19-22

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512442v1

A marmoset brain cell census reveals persistent influence of developmental origin on neurons

KRIENEN LAB JOINS THE BICAN!

10-22

We're thrilled to be part of a new a global collaboration with the Allen Institute to develop comprehensive, single cell atlases of the human and nonhuman primate brain. The collaboration is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative as part of The BRAIN Initiative® Cell Atlas Network, or BICAN, and includes projects led by researchers from 17 other institutions across the US, Europe and Japan.

The Krienen lab will lead efforts to comprehensively map the molecular repertoire of cell types in the marmoset brain, and conduct comparative analysis of homologous cell types in other species including humans. A key aim is to elucidate how brain cell types evolve in mammalian lineages. Understanding the conservation and divergence of cell types across species enables better translation between what we see in animal studies and animal models with the structure and function of the human brain itself.

WELCOME PEDRO!

September 2022

Pedro Estrada joins as the lab's first rotation student. Welcome, Pedro!

SUNNY JOINS THE LAB!

July 1 2022

Founding member Sunny joins the lab as a research specialist! Sunny will help drive forward our collaborative research projects using single cell genomics to map cellular diversity in the CNS.