Research Interests

We use frogs to dissect psychiatric disorders.

Research Area

The Willsey Lab uses the powerful Xenopus tropicalis (diploid frog) model to translate success in psychiatric disorder genetics into actionable mechanisms of risk and resilience. Our work to date has focused on high-confidence, large-effect risk genes for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), where we have identified a convergent phenotype during forebrain neurogenesis. Specifically, we created half-mutant animals (divided by the midline) by CRISPR/Cas9 targeted injections and observed defects in neural progenitor maturation for the top 10 ASD risk genes. By drug screening, we identified estrogen signaling as a potential resilience factor for multiple different genes. Going forward, we are focusing on how these risk genes affect neurogenesis, how estrogen signaling interacts, and expanding this experimental platform to begin work on other disorders with large-effect risk genes, including Schizophrenia, Tourette Disorder, ADHD, and OCD.

Current Members

Willsey, Helen Rankin (Principal Investigator/Director) Contact

Additional Information

We have lists of hundreds of high-confidence, large-effect psychiatric disorder risk genes. However, even within one disorder, these genes represent a wide swath of cellular and developmental functions, obscuring how they contribute to risk. Unraveling the underlying biology of these disorders and identifying effective treatments requires a new approach amenable to large-scale genetic analysis in vivo.

Contact

Institution: University of California, San Francisco

Web Page: https://willseylab.com