Honored to be a Spring 2025 Leakey Foundation Research Grant recipient. I’m deeply grateful to the @leakeyfoundation.org for supporting research in human origins, and to my supervisor @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social for the invaluable guidance and encourargement. leakeyfoundation.org/introducing-...

Introducing the spring 2025 Leakey Foundation grantees

Meet the spring 2025 Leakey Foundation grantees. Their innovative research will shed new light on human origins, evolution, and behavior.

leakeyfoundation.org

Honored to share that we’ve been awarded a grant to advance personalized medicine for CHD2-related disorders. A heartfelt thank you to the @curechd2.bsky.social for supporting this important work. Grateful for the opportunity to contribute to meaningful progress in this field!

Coalition to Cure CHD2@curechd2.bsky.social · last yr.

🎉Coalition to Cure CHD2 has granted €100,000 to @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social to advance personalized medicine for CHD2-related disorders. He & Dr. Elly Lewerissa will explore a novel approach using antisense oligonucleotides to ⬆️CHD2 protein expression. More: www.curechd2.org/p/2025grant-KasriLab

Today is CACNA1A Awareness Day! During my PhD (and now postdoc) I have been investigating this intriguing gene. Check out my latest publication: academic.oup.com/brain/advanc...

CACNA1A haploinsufficiency leads to reduced synaptic function and increased intrinsic excitability

CACNA1A haploinsufficiency leads to a clinically variable phenotype ranging from ataxia to neurodevelopmental syndromes. Hommersom et al. investigate the u

academic.oup.com

How does gene regulation shape brain evolution? Our new preprint dives into this question in the context of mammalian cerebellum development! rb.gy/dbcxjz Led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social

Thank you, Dr. Boeckx, for highlighting our work ! It’s exciting to see the convergence of our findings, which suggest that lysosome function in neuronal development evolves across species in a spatiotemporal- and cell type-dependent manner, with human lysosomes playing unique roles.

Cedric Boeckx@cedricboeckx.bsky.social · last yr.

I was struck by the importance of lysosomes in characterizing these human-specific features, @zhoujoeyyi.bsky.social; this finding links well with our recent work on this pathway, CHD2 and 🧠 maturation (ping @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social @ellylewerissa.bsky.social @olivieroleonardi.bsky.social)

I was struck by the importance of lysosomes in characterizing these human-specific features, @zhoujoeyyi.bsky.social; this finding links well with our recent work on this pathway, CHD2 and 🧠 maturation (ping @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social @ellylewerissa.bsky.social @olivieroleonardi.bsky.social)

The trait-specific timing of accelerated genomic change in the human lineage: Cell Genomics www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

The trait-specific timing of accelerated genomic change in the human lineage

Kun et al. examine the timing of accelerated genomic changes in human evolution by linking human traits to genomic annotations related to distinct evolutionary points. Their findings reveal that skele...

cell.com

Thrilled to share our preprint on how CHD2 dosage controls the autolysosomal pathway ♻️, shaping the neurodevelopmental pace 🧠 that sets us 👩🏽‍🔬 apart from our extinct relatives and great apes🐒: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... See 🧵below:

CHD2 Dosage Ties Autolysosomal Pathway to Cortical Maturation in Disease and Evolution

The relatively slow pace of cortical development in humans has long been a topic of investigation. Studies seeking to understand the underlying mechanisms have mostly focused on neurogenetic compariso...

biorxiv.org

Cedric Boeckx@cedricboeckx.bsky.social · 2y ago

New preprint 📣! Excited to share the result of several years of work, led by @ellylewerissa.bsky.social & @olivieroleonardi.bsky.social, in collaboration with friends @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social & Giuseppe Testa. On CHD2, a chromatin remodeller, its role in evolution & development [🧵] 🧪🧠🧫🧬

I am very happy to share our new paper on the genetics of some of the first modern humans who ever lived in Europe! We sequenced nuclear DNA from 13 specimens from Ranis in Germany, and found that they belonged to at least 6 individuals. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (1/n)

Out today in @sciencemagazine, we've journeyed into our shared history with Neandertals by analyzing over 300 present-day and ancient modern humans, including 59 individuals who lived between 2,000 and 45,000 years ago. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Neanderthal ancestry through time: Insights from genomes of ancient and present-day humans

Gene flow from Neanderthals has shaped genetic and phenotypic variation in modern humans. We generated a catalog of Neanderthal ancestry segments in more than 300 genomes spanning the past 50,000 year...

science.org

Excited to present today at #cshl2024brain about the role of CHD2 dosage in neurodevelopment along disease and evolution. This is a result of a collaborative work with Oliviero Leonardi, Gesta Testa, @cedricboeckx.bsky.social and @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social. See you at poster #111 🧠

Very happy @ellylewerissa.bsky.social & @naelnadifkasri-lab.bsky.social are presenting our collective effort (co-led by O. Leonardi from G. Testa’s lab) to capture the role of CHD2 dosage in neurodevelopment (for disease & evolution), using organoids + 2D neurons #cshl2024brain (Poster 111, today!)