Daniel Geschwind
Associate Professor, Director, Neurogenetics Program
UCLA Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research CenterUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Mail Code 176919
Reed, Rm B-105
Los Angeles, CA 90024
310-794-7537 (tel)
[email protected]
Biography/Curriculum Vitae:
Research Interests:
Identification of genes that contribute to cerebral development and cerebral hemispheric specialization in humans
Narrative of Current Research Efforts:
The major focus of Geschwind's research is to identify genes that contribute to cerebral development and cerebral hemispheric specialization in humans. He is using multidisciplinary approaches including genetic linkage mapping in patients with familial forms of dyslexia and language disorders, and behavior analysis coupled to comparative genomic hybridization in Klinefelter's syndrome to identify X chromosome regions contributing to dyslexia/dysphasia in Klinefelter's patients.
To find genes underlying human language related brain asymmetries, the Geschwind laboratory has applied representational difference analysis (RDA) coupled to DNA microarray screening to identify genes that are differentially expressed in the right and left hemispheres in the developing human embryonic brain. Geschwind's laboratory has recently defined the first chromosomal locus for an enigmatic neuropsychiatric disorder, Fahr's disease. Work in other neurodegenerative disorders, including uncovering the mutational basis of frontotemporal dementia, is ongoing.
The premise underlying much of Geschwind's research is that genetic contributions to the development of brain structures are fundamentally related to human behavior. An exciting future direction of this work involves the coupling of neuroimaging and quantitative genetic approaches to identify genetic contributions to brain structure variations.
Major Honors and Awards:
Representative Publications:
Preuss TM, Caceres M, Oldham MC and Geschwind DH (2004) Human brain evolution: insights from microarrays. Nat Rev Genet, 5:850-60.
Assal F, Alarcon M, Solomon EC, Masterman D, Geschwind DH and Cummings JL (2004) Association of the serotonin transporter and receptor gene polymorphisms in neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer disease. Arch Neurol, 61:1249-53.
Bragin A, Karsten SL, Almajano J, Wilson CL, Geschwind DH and Engel J Jr (2004) Large-scale microarray gene expression analysis in discrete electrophysiologically identified neuronal clusters. J Neurosci Methods, 133:49-55.
Geschwind D (2004) GENSAT: a genomic resource for neuroscience research. Lancet Neurol, 3:82.
Alarcon M, Cantor RM, Liu J, Gilliam TC and Geschwind DH (2002) Evidence for a language quantitative trait locus on chromosome 7q in multiplex autism families. Am J Hum Genet, 70:60-71.
Created 7/27/2006 by Evette Mezger
Last modified 8/25/2006 by Dorwin Birt
