Please join LatinX@Broad in celebrating outstanding research across a variety of disciplines within and beyond Broad. Register now for our next talk on Tuesday, May 13, 2025.

All are welcome to join us for our next scheduled René Salazar Speaker Series talk held by LatinX@Broad:
"Understanding the Interaction Between Sleep and Transcriptional Regulation in Autism"
Tuesday, May 13th, 2025
2:00-3:00 pm
Zoom
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Registration is required via Zoom, please visit: http://broad.io/LatinX_Talks
Lucia Peixoto, PhD
Associate Professor
Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine
Washington State University
Abstract
Insomnia has a high comorbidity with many neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show one of the highest rates of co-occurring insomnia (up to 93%). Problems falling asleep precede ASD diagnosis in infants at high-risk of ASD and predict the severity of ASD core symptoms. We have shown that mice carrying a mutation in Shank3, a high confidence ASD-risk gene, recapitulate all aspects of the clinical sleep phenotype and display an altered homeostatic response to acute sleep deprivation (SD) that arises developmentally. However, the molecular basis of the effect of SD in the brain, in the context of both typical development and ASD remains poorly understood. In presentation we will discuss the impact of SD on transcription using genome-wide bulk and single-cell approaches and how it is modulated by recovery sleep and age. We will also show that the Shank3 mutation largely inhibits this response and that it may do so by modulating 3D chromatin architecture in the nucleus.
Questions? Email latinx-sc@broadinstitute.org.