Page 25 - Rappaport Institute Magazine 2024

BRAIN SCIENCE
22-23
Building tools for the brain
My lab at the Faculty of Medicine of the Technion is a Molecular Neuroscience lab, with a strong focus on the development of genetic and chemical tools to study the brain at various scales, in both health and disease. We study how synaptic receptors (notably NMDARs) affect the function of the synapse and explore how patient-derived mutations instigate brain diseases. These studies are complemented by our efforts to develop unique molecular, chemical, and genetic ‘tools’ to examine synaptic and neural function in vitro and in vivo. Our work lies at the intersection of chemistry, biology and medicine and is reflected by the diverse background of the students that are supervised in the lab (e.g., biologists, medical students, engineers, and chemists.
Selected Publications
ˆ Kellner S., Abbasi A., Carmi I., Heinrich R., Garin-Shkolnik T., Hershkovitz T., Giladi M., Haitin Y., Johannesen K.M., Steensbjerre Møller R., Berlin S.*, (2021). Two de novo GluN2B mutations affect multiple NMDAR-functions and instigate severe pediatric encephalopathy. eLife; 10:e67555. doi: 10.7554/eLife.67555. * Corresponding author.
ˆ Carmi I., De Battista M., Maddalena L., Carroll E.C., Kienzler M.A., Berlin S.* (2019). Holographic Two- photon activation for Synthetic Optogenetic (2019). Nature Protocols; 14(3):864-900. doi: 10.1038/s41596-018-0118-2. * Corresponding author. Front Cover article
ˆ Michael Andreyanov, Ronit Heinrich, Shai Berlin*. (2023). Design of Ultrapotent Genetically Encoded inhibitors of Kv4.2 for Gating Neural Plasticity. J. Neurosci. 2023 Dec 28:JN-RM-2295-22. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2295-22.2023. PMID: 38154956. * Corresponding author. Front Cover article.
ˆ Shaden Zoabi , Michael Andreyanov, Ronit Heinrich , Shaked Ron, Ido Carmi, Yoram Gutfreund, Shai Berlin*. (2022). A novel AAV1 variant for transduction of Japanese quail neurons in vitro and in vivo. Communications Biology. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-1279916/v1.
Grants and Awards
2019 – Hershel-Rich Technion Innovation Award
2020 – 2025 - ERC-starting, MAGNIFISCENT
2021 – 2024 - Templeton Foundation, Mechanisms underlying epigenetic inheritance of superb learning capabilities,Shai Berlin (CO), CO-PIs: Prof. Edi Barkai, Prof. Jackie Schiller
2022 - Proof-of-Concept (PoC) grant (European Research Council) (18 months) 2022 – 2023 - Hittman-T-start grant, Targeted agents for imaging the brain 2024 - 2BCured Foundation
shai.berlin@technion.ac.il
Shai Berlin Lab
Shai Berlin, PhD
Associate Professor of Neurobiology
PhD, 2011 – Tel-Aviv University, Israel
“A novel polycistronic method for designing split-proteins”.
Polycitronic expression xf three fluorocent proteins (blue, green, red) in vivo un rat brain; open reading frames exclusively separated stop codons (without unternal promoters)