Neurology Research Groups

Sanders Group

Research Aims & Objectives

Severe neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) lead to serious and often life-threatening symptoms including seizures, cognitive impairment, communication problems, and motor dysfunction. Our group aims to use bioinformatics to identify the genetic mechanisms underlying these disorders and to develop therapies to improve the lives of those affected

We focus on three main research questions:

How can we find the genetic variants and genes underlying these disorders in the coding and noncoding genome?
What do these genetic variants and genes tell us about the underlying neurobiology?
How can we use these insights to develop advanced therapies to help affected individuals?

Details of research interests

Over the past decade, our group has used whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing of thousands of individuals to identify hundreds of genes underlying NDDs (Read more about this on the PubMed website) and to understand the role of splicing variants and noncoding variants in these disorders (Read more about this on the PubMed website).

Working with collaborators in the USA (UC San Francisco and Yale), we have generated single-cell datasets with epigenetic (ATAC-seq) and transcriptomic (RNA-seq) data from postmortem brain samples of hundreds of individuals. We use these data to understand regulatory processes underlying brain development and NDDs, including the role of biological sex as a modifier. We also aim to use these data to identify genes and variants that are amenable to genome-targeted therapies, including antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and CRISPR-based genome editing.