Dr. Christian Mayer

Research focus: The brain relies on an enormous diversity of local interneurons to form specialized circuits with remarkable processing capacities. Yet how different types neurons emerge during development and integrate into functional circuits remains unclear. Using genetic fate mapping strategies combined with statistical and machine learning-based methods, our goal is to elucidate the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that drive cellular decision-making during interneuron development. We are using high-throughput single cell RNAsequencing methods to reconstruct developmental trajectories and are building an integrated framework to understand how a cell’s spatial localization, epigenomic landscape, parental lineage and neural network activity influence its behavior and fate.

Selected publications:

Ann Rose Bright, Yana Kotlyarenko, Florian Neuhaus, Diana Rodrigues, Chao Feng, Christian Peters, Ilaria Vitali, Elif D¨ onmez, Michael H. Myoga, Elena Dvoretskova, and Christian Mayer (2025). “NFIB influences progenitor competence in maturation of GABAergic neurons in mice”. In: bioRxiv. DOI: 10.1101/2024.03.18.585524

Elena Dvoretskova, May C Ho, Volker Kittke, Florian Neuhaus, Ilaria Vitali, Daniel D Lam, Irene Delgado, Chao Feng, Miguel Torres, Juliane Winkelmann, and Christian Mayer (2024). “Spatial enhancer activation influences inhibitory neuron identity during mouse embryonic development”. In: Nat Neurosci. DOI: 10.1038/s41593-024-01611-9

Rachel C Bandler and Christian Mayer (2023). “Deciphering inhibitory neuron development: The paths to diversity”. In: Curr Opin Neurobiol 79, p. 102691. DOI: 10.1016/j.conb.2023.102691

Rachel C Bandler, Ilaria Vitali, Ryan N Delgado, May C Ho, Elena Dvoretskova, Josue S Ibarra Molinas, Paul W Frazel, Maesoumeh Mohammadkhani, Robert Machold, Sophia Maedler, Shane A Liddelow, Tomasz J Nowakowski, Gord Fishell, and Christian Mayer (2022). “Single-cell delineation of lineage and genetic identity in the mouse brain”. In: Nature 601. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04237-0

Christian Mayer, Christoph Hafemeister, Rachel C Bandler, Robert Machold, Renata Batista Brito, Xavier Jaglin, Kathryn Allaway, Andrew Butler, Gord Fishell, and Rahul Satija (2018). “Developmental diversification of cortical inhibitory interneurons”. In: Nature 555. DOI: 10.1038/nature25999