(She, Her, Hers)

| Email: hermes1130@zedat.fu-berlin.de | Room 101 |

Ama is working on comparative functional characterization of ZEB2 in developing primate neurons. The main focus of this project is revealing the biological secrets of the human brain evolution. Our DNA sequence differs from e.g. chimpanzees only by 1 %, however, our brain function is remarkably high-dimensional and very unique: cognitivity. So far, we know that several transcription factors (TFs) are dominantly human-specific in the brain compared to other non-human primates. ZEB2 is one of them and this TF shows a particularly high protein sequence conservation across many species, while its function seems to differ from species to species. To understand how evolutionary changes in ZEB2 affect gene regulatory network differences between species in the brain, sequencing data of neuronal cells (control/ZEB KO) that are differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) will be generated and analyzed.