Hypothalamus development and disease
Principal Advisor: Professor Stefan Thor and Professor Michael Piper
Email: s.thor@uq.edu.au and m.piper@uq.edu.au
Organisational unit: School of Biomedical Sciences
Sleep is an essential activity and something most animals spend half of their life doing. In mammals, sleep is controlled by the hypothalamus, a tiny part of the mature brain containing a staggering number of different cell types. The control of sleep-wake states is heavily dependent upon specific cells referred to as “sleep neurons”. Loss of sleep neurons triggers narcolepsy in mice, dogs and humans, underscoring the evolutionary conservation of the sleep system. Yet, despite its importance, there are major knowledge gaps in our understanding of how the sleep system develops and how its remarkable cell specificity is achieved.
This PhD project will use the latest arsenal of transcriptomics technologies and bioinformatics analysis to decode the development of the hypothalamic sleep neurons. This knowledge will be used to generate sleep neurons from human induced pluripotent stem cell cells in culture. By applying our emerging insight of sleep neuron generation to human stem cell cultures we will generate sleep neurons in-a-dish, allowing for physiological in vitro studies and for cell transplantation experiments aimed at combating sleep deficits in narcolepsy and other sleep-wake disorders.