This seminar will be held in the Neurological Institute of New York's Auditorium (1st floor). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Lenzie Ford (Kandel lab). For general inquiries please contact [email protected].

The neuronal gene Arc is essential for long-lasting information storage in the mammalian brain, mediates various forms of synaptic plasticity, and has been implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders. We recently discovered that Arc self-assembles into virus-like capsids that encapsulate RNA. Endogenous Arc protein is released from neurons in extracellular vesicles that mediate the transfer of Arc mRNA into new target cells. Evolutionary analysis indicates that Arc is derived from a vertebrate lineage of Ty3/gypsy retrotransposons, which are also ancestral to retroviruses such as HIV. These findings suggest that Gag retroelements have been repurposed during evolution to mediate intercellular communication in the nervous system.

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.