Since the beginning of his career, in Aldo Fasolo’s lab, Federico Luzzati has worked mainly on the neurogenic potential of the adult brain, developing an original research line on parenchymal neurogenesis in different mammalian species in both physiological and pathological conditions. After demonstrating that new neurons can migrate from the periventricular layers to the neocortex, during his PhD, under the supervision of Prof Paolo Peretto, he could show that in the rabbit striatum new neurons can also be generated locally in mature brain parenchyma. Subsequently as a Postdoc and than as an as professor at the University of Turin, he further showed that striatal astrocytes posses a widespread neurogenic potential that can be activated in specific conditions such as acute and progressive degeneration in mice, or during weaning in guinea pig. His technical expertise is mainly in imaging and neuroanatomy, however during a six month visit to Hongjun Song Lab in 2016 he also developed skills in single cell RNAseq.
Research focus
In fish or amphibian larvae, embryonic neural stem cells persist in adults and support brain regeneration. In mammals these cells transform into astrocytes that tile the brain and support neuron activity. In the ‘90 it was found that in two niches some astrocytes generate neurons for the olfactory bulb and the dentate gyrus. We and others now demonstrated that parenchymal astrocytes also possess a neurogenic potential and our single cell RNAseq analysis indicates that their progeny resemble a population of transient embryonic/early post-natal neurons that is still poorly characterized. Several questions remain concerning 1) the activation of the neurogenic program 2) the role of their progeny during development and in adults and 4) whether their cell fate can be reprogrammed to promote brain regeneration. To reach these goals we use several approaches, such as lineage tracing, conditional mutagenesis, molecular and functional studies, whole brain and spatial analyses, 3D reconstructions.
