Principal investigator
Gonçalo Castelo-Branco
Single-cell and spatial epigenomics of the central nervous system.
Castelo-Branco is Professor of Glial Cell Biology at Karolinska Institutet, working on the epigenomic states of oligodendrocyte lineage cells in development and in disease.
His group identified previously unrecognised oligodendrocyte states (Science 2016), showing that these cells are not the uniform population they had been treated as, and that in neuroinflammation they take on immune-like states. Later work found that oligodendroglia are already primed at the epigenomic level at immune genes, implicating them in multiple sclerosis susceptibility, and applied in situ sequencing to map the cellular architecture of MS lesions (Cell 2024).
Getting those answers required new measurement: the group pioneered improvements to CUT&Tag, extended it to single cells with nanobody-based multimodal profiling, and developed spatial CUT&Tag for spatially resolved chromatin modification profiling.
He received his PhD in medical biochemistry in 2005 on dopaminergic neuron development and neural stem cell differentiation, did postdoctoral work at Karolinska Institutet and the University of Cambridge, and started his group in 2012. He was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2022 and has served on the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet since 2023.