Guest Editors
Jürgen Knoblich
Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Vienna, Austria
<p>Jürgen Knoblich, PhD is the Scientific Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA, OEAW). He is an elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences as well as the Board of Directors of the ISSCR, the renowned International Society for Stem Cell Research.</p> <p>Knoblich studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and molecular biology at University College London. He completed his PhD in the lab of Dr. Christian Lehner at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. He then joined the lab of Dr. Yuh Nung Jan at the University of California, San Francisco. Returning to Europe, he joined the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna as a group leader, and in 2004 he moved to the newly founded Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) in Vienna as senior group leader. He was appointed deputy director in 2005 and became scientific director in 2018. Both IMP and IMBA are members of the Vienna Biocenter.</p> <p>Knoblich has been granted several prestigious prizes, including the Wittgenstein Award, the Schroedinger Prize, and the FEBS Anniversary Prize, as well as two Advanced Research Grants from the ERC. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), the Academia European, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Jürgen Knoblich and his research lab are also part of LifeTime, a pan-European initiative to revolutionize healthcare by applying breakthrough technologies to the progression of human diseases that intends to find and implement new methods for personalized prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment.</p> <p>Knoblich’s work focuses on understanding the mechanisms of human brain development. Starting off with the fruit fly Drosophila as model organism, he investigated the molecular mechanisms guiding brain development and pathogenesis. His lab achieved a breakthrough in 2013, when the first organoid model of early human brain development was successfully generated. The novel technology led to a paradigm shift, as cerebral organoids mimic early human brain development in an astoundingly precise way. This opened the door to neurodevelopmental studies and targeted analyses of human neurological disorders that were otherwise not possible. Since then, his lab has achieved further breakthroughs in cerebral organoid technology by generating models that reconstruct the formation of a layered human cortex wi
Elly Tanaka
Institute of Molecular Pathology, IMP, Vienna, Austria
<p>Elly Tanaka is a Senior Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP). Tanaka was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and obtained a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard University in 1987 and a PhD from the University of California, San Francisco in 1993, where she had worked in the lab of Marc W. Kirschner. She then became a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Jeremy Brockes at University College London and Ludwig Institute.</p> <p>Tanaka started her own lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden (Germany) in 1999. Her research focused on axolotl spinal cord regeneration.</p> <p>In 2008, Tanaka became a professor at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of the Technische Universität Dresden. She became director of the center in 2014, before becoming senior group leader at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna in 2016. The Mexican salamander species axolotl is Tanaka's main model system for her research and she is working to translate her work to mouse and human tissue. Using innovative molecular biology and microscopy methods, she identified those stem cells that underlie the regeneration of limbs and the spinal cord. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Developmental Cell.</p> <p>Tanaka was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2017. She was awarded the Ernst Schering Prize in 2017, highlighting her as "the leading expert in the field of regeneration biology". In 2018, she was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for lifetime achievements. In 2020, she was awarded the FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award.</p>
Collection Overview
Our brain is the most complex organ in our body. Models systems like the fruit fly, mouse, and axolotl have offered invaluable insights into central nervous system development and neurodegeneration. Due to cross-species limitations, the field has recently exploited induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and 3D organoid technologies to study neurogenesis in vitro.
Stem cells are fundamentally important for the formation and function of complex multicellular organisms. They are commonly defined by their ability to self-renew and to produce more specialized daughter cells that ultimately undergo terminal differentiation. The possibility to derive neuronal cells from embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells provides a unique opportunity to study neurodevelopment and neuropathology.
The central goal of this collection is to pull together the methods used to break new ground in dissecting the mechanisms that regulate neural progenitors and stem cells in order to generate the huge diversity of neurons found in the central nervous system. We hypothesize that proper integration of extrinsic signals and changes in the internal state of neural stem cell lineages and neuronal subtypes are critical for the establishment of neural circuits and a functional nervous system. We aim at characterizing the mechanisms that regulate neural stem cell identity and analyzing how they are modulated by extrinsic factors and during regeneration.
