Fragile X, Autism and Schizophrenia are characterized by significant limitations both in intellectual functioning and in adaptive behaviour including everyday social and practical
skills. Those disabilities share disturbances in the molecular events that regulate the way nerve cells develop synapses, the contacts between nerve cells that underpin the functioning of our brains. It is estimated that about two thousand brain proteins are involved in the formation of synapses. The hundred billion neurons making up our brain are interconnected among themselves and can exchange information: defective formation of synapses determines various brain diseases, including the fragile X syndrome, autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia but also forms of neurodegeneration such as Alzheimer’s disease. |
Dr. Claudia Bagni is a Neurobiologist and she received her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the
University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. Following postdoctoral positions in France, Germany, and United States, she established her own laboratory at the University of Rome Tor Vergata” and later also at the KU Leuven, Belgium. In 2016, Claudia was appointed Director of the Department of Fundamental Neurosciences at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where her group continues to work on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptopathies affecting brain development and wiring. Find more information on Dr. Claudia Bagni here. |