Sarah Heuer

Optineurin deficiency disrupts phosphorylated tau proteostasis and clusterin expression in human neurons - Acta Neuropathologica Communications Optineurin (OPTN) is an autophagy adaptor protein involved in selective autophagy, including aggrephagy and mitophagy. Pathogenic mutations in OPTN have also been linked to amyotrophic lateral scleros...

New TYP lab publication from co-authors
Zach Augur and @garrettfogo.bsky.social
on deciphering the function of Optineurin in iPSC-derived Neurons and Astrocytes! This will be the first of 3 first-author publications from Zach's PhD thesis! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Huge congrats to @zacharyrmurphy.bsky.social selected as a 2025 Fujifilm Fellow at @harvard.edu 🎉

The Fujifilm Fellowship Program fully funds PhD students doing groundbreaking work in the life sciences!!

Huge shoutout to our brilliant graduate student @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social for delivering a fantastic talk at the HMS Neurobiology Pizza Talk series! 🍕🧠 She highlighted exciting insights into how SHIP1 shapes microglial function at the intersection of intracellular trafficking and immune response.

🧠 New study led by our talented graduate student Courtney Benoit, uncovers how the autism-linked gene POU3F2 supports brain development by promoting neural stem cell growth via Wnt signaling and key targets like ADNP and SOX13. Check it out here in Brain: academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Highlights from our lab at the @keystonesymposia.bsky.social Neurodegeneration meeting!

@heuerwego.bsky.social delivered an excellent talk on ABCA7 loss and microglial dysfunction in Alzheimer’s

@alexlish.bsky.social presented a great poster on CLU and intercellular communication in Alzheimer’s

Astrocyte induction of disease-associated microglia is suppressed by acute exposure to fAD neurons in human iPSC triple cultures Lish et al. present a co-culture system of iPSC-derived human microglia, astrocytes, and neurons to investigate intercellular communication across different environmental and genetic contexts. Transcr...

New TYP lab publication led by PhD student @alexlish.bsky.social out today in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social! We present a reproducible neuron-astrocyte-microglia tri-culture model to better reproduce intercellular interactions in Alzheimer's disease. Read more here: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Huge congrats to our Master’s student Emma Karp for receiving the GBM Master Prize from the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology! 🏆🧬
Emma earned it for her work in Biomedical Neurosciences at TUM! 🎓🧠
🔗 gbm-online.de/de/studium-k...

Honored to have been awarded the Martha Ondrey Junior Investigator Award for my postdoc work in @typlab.bsky.social!

Big shoutout to our lab at the annual ROSMAP meeting in Chicago!

🎉 @heuerwego.bsky.social gave a great talk & won the Martha Ondrey Jr. Investigator Award 🏆

🧠 @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social crushed it with her presentation on SHIP1 & the inflammasome in microglia!

Cool to see my PhD mentor’s work highlighted!!

Emma has become such an impactful member of the lab and will truly be missed!! Big things ahead for this young neuroscientist!

Some TYP members attended the BIGG meeting at UMass on Monday, and had a great time presenting talks and posters! PhD student @gizemterzioglu.bsky.social & postdoc @kelliannealexa1.bsky.social gave amazing short talks, Master's student Emma & postdoc @heuerwego.bsky.social got great poster traffic!

CLU alleviates Alzheimer’s disease-relevant processes by modulating astrocyte reactivity and microglia-dependent synaptic density Genetic studies implicate clusterin (CLU) in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), yet its precise molecular impact remains unclear. Through u…

Thrilled to share my first first-author paper is out
@cp-neuron.bsky.social! We show that Alzheimer's disease protective CLU alleles upregulate CLU in response to neuropathology, dampening inflammatory signaling between microglia and astrocytes.

Read here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

CLU alleviates Alzheimer’s disease-relevant processes by modulating astrocyte reactivity and microglia-dependent synaptic density Lish et al. reveal that AD-protective CLU alleles enhance CLU upregulation in response to accumulated neuropathology, thereby dampening inflammatory signaling between microglia and astrocytes. Using s...

New TYP lab paper out today in @cp-neuron.bsky.social led by PhD student @alexlish.bsky.social! We took a deep dive into the mechanisms underlying CLU in AD using innovative iPSC, mouse, and human data approaches. Be sure to give it a read!
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

Yay Kellie!!!!

Honored and excited to be part of the @brightfocus.bsky.social community, and have funding for my postdoctoral work on ABCA7 genetic variants in Alzheimer's disease!

Some members of the TYP lab had a great (and only mildly frigid) outing to Fenway to see the Red Sox play this week!

Agent-based modeling of neuronal mitochondrial dynamics using intrinsic variables of individual mitochondria Mitochondrial networks undergo remodeling to regulate form and function. The dynamic nature of mitochondria is maintained by the dueling processes of mitochondrial fission and fusion. Dysfunctional mi...

The final bit of my PhD work from the Sanderson Lab is now out in iScience!

Agent-based modeling of neuronal mitochondrial dynamics using intrinsic variables of individual mitochondria: iScience www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

@gizemterzioglu.bsky.social will be presenting at the Microglia Symposium on the afternoon of April 4th! Her talk is titled "INPP5D/SHIP1 REGULATES MICROGLIA FUNCTION AND INFLAMMATORY RESPONSE IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE"

Zach Augur will be presenting a poster during Shift 1 on April 2nd and 3rd titled "BAG3 IN ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE AND ITS IMPACT ON ASTROCYTE FUNCTION AND DISEASE PROGRESSION"

For anyone headed to ADPD next week, be sure to come by Zach's poster and Gizem's talk to learn about all the cool work they've been doing!

Mitochondrial dynamics and quality control regulate proteostasis in neuronal ischemia-reperfusion Mitochondrial damage and dysfunction are hallmarks of neuronal injury during cerebral ischemia-reperfusion (I/R). Critical mitochondrial functions including energy production and cell signaling are...

Happy to share a large part of my PhD work that is now published in Autophagy!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Proud of our amazing postdoc @kelliannealexa1.bsky.social who gave a fantastic talk today on her work with neuronal hyperexcitability and modeling blood-brain-barrier dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease today as part of the BWH Neuroscience Seminar Series!

Congratulations Dr. Lish on the amazing defense!!

PLXNB1 and other signaling drives a pathologic astrocyte state contributing to cognitive decline in Alzheimer's Disease https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.24.639868v1

Congratulations @zacharyrmurphy.bsky.social on becoming a PhD candidate!

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🧠VCID Workshop alert🧠

Who: Trainees and PIs
What: VCID science and talks with some of the top leaders in the field!
When: May 12-15th, 2025
Where: The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor Maine
Why: Seminars, activities, career development, collaboration
How: www.jax.org/education-an...

Contributions of Genetic Variation in Astrocytes to Cell and Molecular Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience to Late‐Onset Alzheimer's Disease Generation and characterization of induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived astrocytes from 44 aged humans reveals congruence of gene expression profiles between astrocyte cultures and brain and ...

New TYP lab publication out today in Glia, led by talented previous PhD student Hyo Lee! Our first big analysis of induced Astrocytes from 44 individuals in the ROSMAP cohort.
You can find it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Happy #FluorescenceFriday and inaugural bluesky post- some beautiful microglia-neuron-astrocyte co-cultures from TYP lab postdoc @heuerwego.bsky.social!