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In 1998, Gage led a research team which discovered that adult brains do produce new neurons, contrary to decades of dogma saying we are born with all the neurons we will ever have. Since then, he has been elucidating various aspects of this neurogenesis as well as what goes wrong in various neurological disorders. (In 2015, for example, his lab identified a cellular basis for bipolar disorder.)
The new work sought to understand how neural precursor cells maintain their own cellular identity as they divide and create neurons or astrocytes. Gage's team already knew that the cell nucleus—the ball-shaped membrane containing the genome—looks very different in the three cell types, with different genes active in each. Another Salk professor and a coauthor on the paper, Martin Hetzer, previously found that proteins in the nuclear membrane influence gene expression in different kinds of cancer cells. The Gage team sought the expertise of the Hetzer lab to explore whether something similar was at play in brain cells.
"Research from my lab has found that the nuclear membrane is a dynamic structure that plays a key role in developmental gene regulation," says Hetzer, Salk's chief science officer and holder of the Jesse and Caryl Philips Foundation Chair. "So we were very interested to see what the Gage lab, working with entirely different cell types, would uncover."
