Name: Dr. Christoper K Thompson

Position: Associate Professor

Research Description:

The Thompson laboratory focuses on how hormones shape the development and plasticity of neural circuits. Hormones are long-distance messengers that act on tissues throughout the body, but their specific effects vary in time and space. This is particularly true during brain development; hormone action on neural circuits depends upon a combination of transporters, activating and inactivating enzymes, and hormone receptors, all of which vary their levels of expression during ontogeny. Once hormone signaling is initiated, it will unleash a cascade of molecular events that have an enormous impact on the molecular, cellular, and anatomical trajectory of brain growth and function.

Thyroid hormone is a critical regulator of vertebrate brain development, impacting neural cell proliferation, differentiation, and dendritic arbor elaboration pre and postnatally. Disruption of thyroid hormone signaling during development is associated with significant, long-lasting behavioral deficits in humans. The specific molecular and cellular events that are regulated by changes in thyroid hormone signaling are still unclear, however. It is difficult to assess the effects of thyroid hormone on the cellular processes that underlie early brain development in mammalian systems because of the inaccessibility of the brain in the uterine environment and the inability to disambiguate the relative maternal versus fetal contributions of thyroid hormone. African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) tadpoles are ideal for studies on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying thyroid hormone’s effects on brain development because the external development of tadpoles allows manipulation and direct observation of cell proliferation, neuronal differentiation and morphological changes underlying brain development. Furthermore, although a surge of thyroid hormone drives metamorphosis in mature tadpoles, younger tadpoles are acutely sensitive to exposure to thyroid hormone.

Our lab focuses on two aspects of how thyroid hormone affects tadpole brain development: 1) how do changes in thyroid hormone signaling affect neural progenitor cell proliferation, neuronal differentiation, dendritic arborization, cell death, changes in gene expression, and brain morphology? 2) How do manmade compounds suspected to disrupt thyroid hormone signaling affect brain development?  We address these issues in the tadpole visual system using in vivo imaging, whole-mount immunohistochemistry, QPCR, Western blot, and 3D reconstruction.

Lab Memberships

Cline Lab (Post-doc, Alumni)
Thompson Lab (Principal Investigator/Director)

Contact Information

Address:
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA
USA

Web Page: http://neuroscience.vt.edu/people/core-faculty/thompson-ck.html