Gonçalo Castelo-Branco Group

The Hans Wigzell Research Foundation (Hans Wigzells Forskningsstiftelse) awards its annual scientific prize to Professor Gonçalo Castelo-Branco. He receives the prize of SEK 925,000 for his important research around oligodendrocytes – a cell type which plays important roles in relation to how the human brain develops and functions.

An ongoing effort to create detailed molecular atlases of individual cells in different tissues aims to better understand how diseases develop. Now, a team of researchers from Yale and Karolinska Institutet, has developed a technology that brings that goal one step closer. The findings were published in Nature.

In a new study published in Science, researchers at Yale University, in collaboration with researchers at Karolinska Institutet, have developed a technique that gives very precise information about the location of activated and inactivated genes in a specific tissue. This can provide important knowledge about how different tissues develop and how epigenetic regulation contributes to the development of disease.

Gonçalo Castelo-Branco, Mandy Meijer, and Eneritz Agirre, have discovered that a cell type in the central nervous system known as oligodendrocytes might have a different role in the development of multiple sclerosis (MS) than previously thought. The findings, published in the journal Neuron, could open for new therapeutical approaches to MS.

Gonçalo Castelo Branco is newly appointed Professor of Glial Cell Biology. We talked to him about the next steps in his research and the job he was dreaming of as a kid.

Gonçalo Castelo-Branco at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (MBB) at Karolinska Institutet, receives the 2021 Eric K. Fernström prize for young, especially promising and successful researchers, for his significant research in the oligodendrocyte/myelin field and multiple sclerosis. Note that the prize 2020 was advanced to 2021.

Histones are tiny proteins that bind to DNA and hold information that can help turn on or off individual genes. We have developed a technique that makes it possible to examine how different versions of histones bind to the genome in tens of thousands of individual cells simultaneously. The technique was applied to the mouse brain and can be used to study epigenetics at a single-cell level in other complex tissues. The study is published in Nature Biotechnology.

The prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and consists of a research grant of SEK 5.1 million, spread over three years, with a personal prize of SEK 250,000.

A new open access review from Leslie and Gonçalo on immune oligodendroglia, part of a special series in Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology on Myelin, dedicated to the  Nobel Mini-Symposium 55 The Dark Side of the Brain.

Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation grant of SEK 34,000,000 for the project "Insights on the role of oligodendroglia in the origin and progression of multiple sclerosis". The GCB lab is also part of the project "Epigenomic states underlying aggressive inflammation and brain tissue loss in Multiple Sclerosis" that has received funding as well.