For the first time, Neurobiology Professor Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy has successfully developed an approach for identifying the proteins that exist inside different neurons in the brain. Kozorovitskiy is the Soretta and Henry Shapiro Research Professor of Molecular Biology.
Kozorovitskiy worked on the study with researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh. The team managed to chemically tag proteins and their neighbors, which allowed them to observe the proteins in a controlled area. These findings will be essential for understanding the interworkings of the brain’s millions of distinct proteins.
“Similar work has been done before in cellular cultures. But cells in a dish do not work the same way they do in a brain, and they don’t have the same proteins in the same places doing the same things,” said Kozorovitskiy. “It’s a lot more challenging to do this work in the complex tissue of a mouse brain. Now we can take that proteomics prowess and put it into more realistic neural circuits with excellent genetic traction.”
Now that this new system has been validated and is ready to go, the researchers will be able to apply it to mouse models for disease to better understand neurological illnesses.
According to Kozorovitskiy’s research lab website, their long-range goal “is to accelerate the understanding of neuromodulation and plasticity in the brain,” with research that facilitates “the development of therapeutic applications, harnessing the power of neuromodulators to functionally reconfigure, and sometimes even literally rewire, neural circuits.”
Kozorovitskiy is also one of 23 early-career scientists who recently won funding for research as part of the inaugural year of Scialog: Advancing BioImaging. This three-year initiative aims to accelerate the development of the next generation of imaging technologies. Scialog is supported by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation.
Read more about Kozorovitskiy’s study in the Northwestern Now article here.