A paper on which Shaun collaborated with Simona Lodato and colleagues in Paola Arlotta’s lab in Harvard University has been published in Nature Neuroscience. “Gene co-regulation by Fezf2 selects neurotransmitter identity and connectivity of corticospinal neurons” finds that Fezf2 is a selector gene that regulates the expres
sion of gene sets that collectively define mouse corticospinal motor neurons (CSMN). Ectopic expression of Fezf2 in neocortical progenitors in vivo is sufficient to induce the cellular programming of CSMNs. As part of the current study, we helped to analyze ChIP-seq data from Fezf2 when it was over-expressed in cortical neural progenitors. Unusually for a programming transcription factor, Fezf2 appears to bind primarily to the promoter regions of a large number of genes.
