Overview
Brain development is achieved through a tightly controlled sequence of events from neurogenesis, cell migration, differentiation, neuritogenesis, to synapse formation and stabilization, in order to establish a normal neuronal network. The impairment of any of these critical stages of brain development can lead to long-term deleterious effects ranging from mild cognitive impairment, to severe neurological and psychiatric conditions. Moreover, several brain pathologies present developmental-like events in their aetiology, perhaps in an attempt to get a functional recover, but due to the inadequate context become deleterious. Hence, our group explores brain disorders from the perspective of brain development, either using the ground-breaking rationale of the existence of a reactivation of developmental-related mechanisms in brain pathogenesis or evaluating the long-term impact in adulthood of defects in neuronal migration and synaptogenesis during development. In this realm, we are particularly interested in the role of extracellular ATP, a proposed danger signal in the brain, and glutamate, the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, and the interaction between these two receptor signalling systems both in brain development and disease. This is approached using a vast array of techniques from genomics and proteomics to electrophysiology, functional imaging, morphological and histological analysis, and behavior, using primary cell cultures, cell lines, explant cultures and small laboratory animals.
