The People

Research Interests

Neural stem cells self-renew to maintain their pool, yet differentiate into enormous functionally and morphologically distinct neurons and glia. Proper regulation of self-renewal and differentiation has profound consequences in development and homeostasis. Decreased neurogenesis could lead to defects in brain development resulting in neurodevelopmental disorders like microcephaly, epilepsy and autism. On the other hand, an increase in self-renewal could lead to malignancies such as cancer. We are interested in identifying the mechanisms and the molecular players underlying neural stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. To study these processes, we use Drosophila developing brain and human neuronal stem cells as model systems. We utilize state of the art genome editing tools and a diverse set of cell and molecular biology approaches.

Selected Publications

Cheramangalam RN, Anand T, Pandey P, Balasubramanian D, Varghese R, Singhal N, Nagarkar Jaiswal N#, Jaiswal M# (2023) Bendless is essential for PINK1-Park mediated Mitofusin degradation under mitochondrial stress caused by loss of LRPPRC. PLoS Genet 19(4): e1010493 (* Corresponding author). https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pgen.1010493 Nagarkar-Jaiswal S.#, Manivannan SN, Zuo Z., Bellen HJ#. Flip-Flop, a facile, cell cycle-independent, conditional gene inactivation strategy differentially tagging wild-type and mutant cells eLife 6:e26420 . Skinner SO*, Xu H*, Nagarkar-Jaiswal S, Freire PR, Zwaka TP, Golding I. Single-cell analysis of transcription kinetics across the cell cycle. eLife 5:e12175

Nagarkar-Jaiswal S*, DeLuca S*, Lee PT, Lin WW, Pan H, Zuo Z, Lv Z, Spradling AC, Bellen HJ (2015). A genetic toolkit for tagging intronic MiMICs containing genes. eLife 4:e08469

Carrillo CA*,Ozkan E*, Menon KP*, Nagarkar-Jaiswal S, Jeon M, Bellen HJ, Garcia CK, Zinn K. Control of synaptic connectivity in Drosophila by a network of IgSF surface proteins. Cell 163:1770-1782 (*equal contribution)

Nagarkar-Jaiswal S, Lee PT, Campbell ME, Chen K, Anguiano-Zarate S, Cantu Gutierrez M, Busby T, Lin WW, He Y, Schulze KL, Booth BW, Evans-Holm M, Venken KJ, Levis RW, Spradling AC, Hoskins RA, Bellen HJ (2015) A library of MiMICs allows tagging of genes and reversible spatial and temporal knockdown of proteins in Drosophila. eLife 4:e05338

(# Co-corresponding authors)(*equal contribution)