Abstract:
Brain organoids are miniaturized 3D avatars of the human brain derived from human pluripotent stem cells. They emerged as invaluable tools for investigating early human neuronal development, modeling neurological disorders, and for drug-screening applications. Veronica's presentation will delve into the principles of brain organoid generation, exploring the advantages and challenges associated with their use as cellular platforms for studying complex neurological syndromes. Furthermore, Veronica will highlight the research conducted in the Adamo laboratory, specifically focusing on modeling sex chromosome aneuploidies during early neurodevelopment. A comprehensive analysis integrating morphological, transcriptomic, and functional assessments demonstrated that supernumerary sex chromosomes detrimentally affect neural patterning, cortical architecture, and electrophysiological properties of brain organoids in a sex chromosome dose-dependent fashion.

Bio:
Dr. Astro is a senior research scientist in Professor Adamo's laboratory at KAUST. She earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine from San Raffaele University in Italy. Throughout her research career, she served as a visiting scientist at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. She received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research in Professor Zerial's lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Recently, Veronica was trained in utilizing brain organoids to model neurological diseases in Professor Muotri's lab at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently leveraging her expertise to investigate the neurodevelopmental implications of human sex chromosomal aneuploidies through iPSC-based disease models.