Prof. Dr. Magdalena Götz
Head of Stem Cell Center Department, Head of Institute of Stem Cell Research, Head of Research Group Neural Stem Cells“My vision is to explore the mechanisms of neurogenesis to use it for instructing neurogenesis for replacement of lost neurons.”
“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 cellsNeurogenesisDirect neuronal reprogrammingViral vectorsBrain 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
Honors and Awards
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, German Research Foundation
Advanced ERC Grant
Roger de Spoelberch Prize, Roger de Spoelberch Foundation
Advanced ERC Grant
Publications
Read more2022 Scientific Article in Molecular Systems Biology
Probing cell identity hierarchies by fate titration and collision during direct reprogramming.
2022 Scientific Article in Science
Spatial centrosome proteome of human neural cells uncovers disease-relevant heterogeneity.
2022 Scientific Article in Science Advances
Excessive local host-graft connectivity in aging and amyloid-loaded brain.
2022 Scientific Article in Science Advances
Brain injury environment critically influences the connectivity of transplanted neurons.
2022 Review in Trends in Cell Biology
Centrosome heterogeneity in stem cells regulates cell diversity.
2022 Scientific Article in Cells
Innate immune pathways promote oligodendrocyte progenitor cell recruitment to the injury site in adult Zebrafish brain.
2022 Scientific Article in EMBO Molecular Medicine
Parkinson's disease motor symptoms rescue by CRISPRa-reprogramming astrocytes into GABAergic neurons.
2022 Scientific Article in Advanced science
Molecular signature of astrocytes for gene delivery by the synthetic adeno-associated viral vector rAAV9P1.
2022 Scientific Article in Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences - CMLS
The extracellular matrix molecule tenascin-C modulates cell cycle progression and motility of adult neural stem/progenitor cells from the subependymal zone.
2022 Review in Neuron
Direct neuronal reprogramming: Fast forward from new concepts toward therapeutic approaches.
2021 Scientific Article in Frontiers in cell and developmental biology
TUNAR lncRNA encodes a microprotein that regulates neural differentiation and neurite formation by modulating calcium dynamics.
2021 Scientific Article in Journal of Visualized Experiments
Cryo-section dissection of the adult subependymal zone for accurate and deep quantitative proteome analysis.
2021 Scientific Article in EMBO Journal, The
Molecular diversity of diencephalic astrocytes reveals adult astrogenesis regulated by Smad4.
2021 Review in Frontiers in cell and developmental biology
Non-codon optimized PiggyBac transposase induces developmental brain aberrations: A call for in vivo analysis.
2021 Editorial in Current Opinion in Genetics & Development
Editorial overview: Fluidity of cell fates - from reprogramming to repair.
2021 Scientific Article in Cell Reports