Novel Insights in Mental Illness: from Etiology to Therapeutic Outcomes

In this course, several cell models utilized to study the major type of neurodegenerative diseases will be presented. Details will be provided on how to prepare and use neuronal and glial primary cultures, immortalized neuronal, motoneuronal and glial cells as well as cancer derived neuroblastoma cells or neuronal and glial cells derived from differentiation of stem cells, including from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The most widely used transfection techniques utilize to prepare transiently and stably transfected models of disease will be deeply discussed, including the procedure to gene editing (e.g.: CRISPR/Cas9) useful to introduce mutations or to repair them into an endogenous gene with the aim to determine the adverse effects of these mutation in the brain. Several techniques focused to determine aberrant activities/functions of mutant proteins associated to neurodegeneration will be discussed