2 Post Doc Positions in Neurogenetics at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

The “Genetics and Epigenetics of Behaviour” Research Line at IIT, led by Dr Valter Tucci, is mainly focused on the investigation of sleep, circadian clock and behavior.

Epigenetic marks across the genome influence sleep and daily rhythms imposed by the Earth’s rotation around its axis (circadian clock). Over the last decade, our lab provided the first direct evidence that genomic imprinting is an important player in sleep regulation, and we demonstrated that the parental origin of a gene can influence the sleep profile. Genomic imprinting is well-known in epigenetics as a mark across the genome that cause the expression pattern of an allele depending on its parental origin (see Tucci et al., Cell. 2019 Feb 21;176 (5):952-965). Further investigation in the genomic imprinting hypothesis of sleep is instrumental to understand sleep biology in mammals. This parent-of-origin epigenetic aspect was never considered in sleep and circadian studies before. Imprinted genes are highly expressed in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, which serves as the main master clock, and in the hypothalamus and frontal cortex, in which specific circuitries serve as the sleep-wake centres of the brain.

The hypothesis that imprinting has set an evolutionary agenda for the physiology of mammalian sleep has been an attractive idea that now urges a systematic exploration.

Therefore, driven by this hypothesis, our Research Line is now recruiting two post-docs to address the following questions: how epigenetic inheritance impacts on single neuronal responses in the brain and how evolutionary changes has influenced the link between sleep and imprinted genes.

Further details:
2 Post Doc Positions in Neurogenetics at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia