Home Department: undeclared
Mentor: Andrew Fire (Pathology and Genetics)

“A Bioinformatic Screen and Experimental Investigation of Large-Gene Regulators in C. elegans”

The Fire lab studies how cells and organisms respond to genetic change. During nervous system evolution, many neuronal genes became extremely large and complex and are now frequently mutated or misregulated in neurological disorders and diseases. Lorenzo’s research is jointly focus on (i) creating a computational pipeline to sift through an online database of Ceanorhabditis elegans mutants to identify regulators of large, complex genes, and (ii) experimentally validate putative large gene regulators by leveraging C. elegans genetics and transgenics. This research has the potential to uncover fundamental features of neurobiology as well as highlight novel targets for treatment of disease.