Head of Stem Cell Center Department, Head of Institute of Stem Cell Research, Head of Research Group Neural Stem Cells
Prof. Dr. Magdalena Götz
“My vision is to explore the mechanisms of neurogenesis to use it for instructing neurogenesis for replacement of lost neurons.”
Academic Pathway & Research Area
Magdalena Götz studied biology at Tübingen and Zürich and fell in love with developmental biology during that time already. She performed her doctoral thesis on identifying mechanisms how neurons find their targets in the developing brain and proceeded in her postdoc work on mechanisms of brain regionalization and fate specification, using the state-of-the art viral vector tools developed at that time. When she became a group leader at the Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology she was the first to utilize fluorescent-activated cell sorting to identify progenitor subtypes which led to the discovery of radial glial cells as the actual neural stem cells (Malatesta et al., 2000). This led her to probe the - at that time prior to the invention of induced pluripotent stem cells - crazy idea of turning differentiated glia into neurons, i.e. the invention of direct neuronal reprogramming (Heins et al., 2002). Since then, in her tenured positions at Helmholtz Munich and LMU, she developed this approach further by improving reprogramming to the amazing efficiency of up to 90% even in vivo after brain injury targeting selectively reactive, proliferating glia (Gascon et al., 2016), establishing this approach also for cells isolated from adult human brains (Karow et al., 2012), and establishing many fundamental principles and mechanisms during this process, such as the key influence of the starter cells (Kempf et al., 2021) and the crucial contribution of the mitochondrial proteome (Russo et al., 2021).
Importantly, Magdalena Götz never left her core expertise – exploring mechanisms of brain development – that she could then also use for reprogramming. She discovered a novel nuclear protein that acts like a master regulator of phase transition in the nucleus coregulating several compartments (Esgleas et al., 2020) as the first factor to regulate brain folding even in the normally smooth murine brain (Stahl et al., 2013). In her recent work she serendipitously identified the amazingly specific regulation of a novel interphase centrosome protein, Akna, in only subsets of neural stem cells (Camargo et al., 2019) and took these to explore the comprehensive proteome of human neural stem cells and neurons that she showed to differ from other cells by more than half of their entire proteome (O’Neill et al. 2022). This basic research allowed her to understand how mutation of a ubiquitous protein can actually result in brain disease – namely due to its centrosome localization only in neural cells.
Fields of Work and Expertise
Neural stem cells Neurogenesis Direct neuronal reprogramming Viral vectors Brain injury
Professional Background
Dr.rer.nat at the Friedrich-Miescher Institute of the Max-Planck Society, Tübingen, Germany
Postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Medical Research, London and Smith Kline Beecham, Harlow, UK
Group Leader Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology
Director of the Institute of Stem Cell Research & Chair of Physiological Genomics, LMU
External member of the Max-Planck Society at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry
Publications
Hennes, M. ; Richter, M. ; Fischer-Sternjak, J. ; Götz, M.
Astrocyte diversity and subtypes: Aligning transcriptomics with multimodal perspectives.Martinez-Reza, M.F. ; Götz, M.
Wrap it up: Myelination of transplanted neurons for repair.Merino, F.L. ; Götz, M.
The role of moonlighting proteins in neurogenesis.Maddhesiya, P. ; Lepko, T. ; Steiner‑Mezzardi, A. ; Schneider, J. ; Schwarz, V. ; Merl-Pham, J. ; Berger, F. ; Hauck, S.M. ; Ronfani, L. ; Bianchi, M.E. ; Simon, T. ; Krontira, A. ; Masserdotti, G. ; Götz, M. ; Ninkovic, J.
Hmgb2 improves astrocyte to neuron conversion by increasing the chromatin accessibility of genes associated with neuronal maturation in a proneuronal factor-dependent manner.Götz, M. ; Torres-Padilla, M.E.
Stem cells as role models for reprogramming and repair.Bocchi, R. ; Thorwirth, M. ; Simon-Ebert, T. ; Koupourtidou, C. ; Clavreul, S. ; Kolf, K. ; Della Vecchia, P. ; Bottes, S. ; Jessberger, S. ; Zhou, J. ; Wani, G. ; Pilz, G.A. ; Ninkovic, J. ; Buffo, A. ; Sirko, S. ; Götz, M. ; Fischer-Sternjak, J.
Astrocyte heterogeneity reveals region-specific astrogenesis in the white matter.Natarajan, P. ; Koupourtidou, C. ; de Resseguier, T. ; Thorwirth, M. ; Bocchi, R. ; Fischer-Sternjak, J. ; Gleiss, S. ; Rodrigues, D. ; Myoga, M.H. ; Ninkovic, J. ; Masserdotti, G. ; Götz, M.
Single cell deletion of the transcription factors Trps1 and Sox9 in astrocytes reveals novel functions in the adult cerebral cortex.Puglisi, M. ; Lao, C.L. ; Wani, G. ; Masserdotti, G. ; Bocchi, R. ; Götz, M.
Comparing viral vectors and fate mapping approaches for astrocyte-to-neuron reprogramming in the injured mouse cerebral cortex.Pereira, A. ; Diwakar, S.J. ; Masserdotti, G. ; Beşkardeş, S. ; Simon, T. ; So, Y. ; Martín-Loarte, L. ; Bergemann, F. ; Vasan, L. ; Schauer, T. ; Danese, A. ; Bocchi, R. ; Colomé-Tatché, M. ; Schuurmans, C. ; Philpott, A. ; Straub, T. ; Bonev, B. ; Götz, M.
Direct neuronal reprogramming of mouse astrocytes is associated with multiscale epigenome remodeling and requires Yy1.Berndt, C. ; Alborzinia, H. ; Amen, V.S. ; Ayton, S. ; Barayeu, U. ; Bartelt, A. ; Bayir, H. ; Bebber, C.M. ; Birsoy, K. ; Böttcher, J.P. ; Brabletz, S. ; Brabletz, T. ; Brown, A.R. ; Brüne, B. ; Bulli, G. ; Bruneau, A. ; Chen, Q. ; DeNicola, G.M. ; Dick, T.P. ; Distéfano, A. ; Dixon, S.J. ; Engler, J.B. ; Esser-von Bieren, J. ; Fedorova, M. ; Friedmann Angeli, J.P. ; Friese, M.A. ; Fuhrmann, D.C. ; García-Sáez, A.J. ; Garbowicz, K. ; Götz, M. ; Gu, W. ; Hammerich, L. ; Hassannia, B. ; Jiang, X. ; Jeridi, A. ; Kang, Y.P. ; Kagan, V.E. ; Konrad, D.B. ; Kotschi, S. ; Lei, P. ; Le Tertre, M. ; Lev, S. ; Liang, D. ; Linkermann, A. ; Lohr, C. ; Lorenz, S. ; Luedde, T. ; Methner, A. ; Michalke, B. ; Milton, A.V. ; Min, J. ; Mishima, E. ; Müller, S. ; Motohashi, H. ; Muckenthaler, M.U. ; Murakami, S. ; Olzmann, J.A. ; Pagnussat, G.C. ; Pan, Z. ; Papagiannakopoulos, T. ; Pedrera Puentes, L. ; Pratt, D.A. ; Proneth, B. ; Ramsauer, L. ; Rodriguez, R. ; Saito, Y. ; Schmidt, F. ; Schmitt, C. ; Schulze, A. ; Schwab, A. ; Schwantes, A. ; Soula, M. ; Spitzlberger, B. ; Stockwell, B.R. ; Thewes, L. ; Thorn-Seshold, O. ; Toyokuni, S. ; Tonnus, W. ; Trumpp, A. ; Vandenabeele, P. ; Vanden Berghe, T. ; Venkataramani, V. ; Vogel, F.C.E. ; von Karstedt, S. ; Wang, F. ; Westermann, F. ; Wientjens, C. ; Wilhelm, C. ; Wölk, M. ; Wu, K. ; Yang, X. ; Yu, F. ; Zou, Y. ; Conrad, M.
Ferroptosis in health and disease.