| Principal Investigators
Joel E. Kleinman, M.D., Ph.D. |
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Joel
E. Kleinman, M.D., Ph.D. is the Section Chief of the Section
on Neuropathology and the Deputy Chief of the Clinical
Brain Disorders Branch. Dr. Kleinman received his
B.S., M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He
completed an internship at San Francisco General Hospital
(University of California Medical School in San Francisco)
and residencies in psychiatry and neurology at Massachusetts
Mental Health Center (Harvard Medical School) and George
Washington University Medical School, respectively.
Dr. Kleinman has been at the NIMH from 1976 to the present and has published over 200 papers primarily on the neuropathology of schizophrenia. His more recent work has focused on susceptibility genes for schizophrenia including COMT, GRM3, DISC1, DTNBP1, GAD1, KCNH2 and NRG1. In particular, his group has been particularly interested in studying allelic variations in these genes and their effects on mRNA expression of specific alternate transcripts and their proteins in brain development and schizophrenia.
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Research Interests |
The research program of the
Section on Neuropathology is primarily interested in the neuropathology of
schizophrenia and seeks to determine the molecular, cellular and genetic
mechanisms that underlie this syndrome. The section investigates these
mechanisms by focusing on neural circuits that are believed to underlie
schizophrenia, including the prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, brainstem
and striatum with special influence on molecules involved in synapse formation,
plasticity and neurodevelopment. The section also investigates susceptibility
genes for schizophrenia and their relationships to these neural
circuits. |
Representative Selected Recent Publications: |
- Weickert CS, Miranda-Angulo AL, Wong J, Perlman WR, Ward SE, Vakkalanka R, Straub RE, Weinberger D R and Kleinman JE:
Variants in the estrogen receptor alpha gene and its mRNA contribute to risk for schizophrenia.
Human Molecular Genetics. 17:2293-2309, 2008.
- Law AJ, Kleinman JE, Weinberger DR and Weickert CS:
Disease associated intronic variants in the ErbB4 gene are related to altered ErbB4 splice variant expression in the brain in schizophrenia.
Human Molecular Genetics, 16:129-141, 2007.
- Lipska BK, Peters T, Hyde TM, Halim N, Horowitz C, Mitkus S, Weickert CS, Matsumoto M, Sawa A, Straub R, Vakkalanka R, Herman MM, Weinberger DR and Kleinman JE:
Expression of DISC1 binding partners is reduced in schizophrenia and associated with DISC1 SNPs.
Human Molecular Genetics, 15:1245-1258, 2006.
- Weickert CS, Straub RE, McClintock BW, Matsumoto M, Hashimoto R, Hyde TM, Herman MM, Weinberger DR and Kleinman JE:
Human dysbindin (DTNBP1) gene expression in normal brain and in schizophrenic prefrontal cortex and midbrain.
Archives of General Psychiatry, 61:544-555, 2004.
- Akil M, Kolachana BS, Rothmond DA, Hyde TM, Weinberger DR and Kleinman JE :
COMT genotype and dopamine regulation in the human brain.
J. of Neuroscience, 23:2008-2013, 2003.
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