Natalie is a Ph.D. student in the Neurobiology and Behavior program. She joined the Liu lab in January 2021, where she studies the pathogenicity of DNA methylation at the C9orf72 locus in ALS. Specifically, hexanucleotide G4C2 repeat expansions in the C9orf72 gene are one of the most common causes of familial and sporadic ALS. These repeats, and flanking CpG islands, have been associated with DNA methylation. However, how these methylation events contribute to ALS remains unclear.

Natalie received her B.S. in Neural Science from New York University in 2017 and M.Sc. in Biomedical Science from Mount Sinai in 2019. Natalie completed her master’s thesis in Dr. Kristen Brennand’s lab, where she optimized an inhibitory differentiation protocol in neural progenitor cells to study cell-type specific neurexin 1 alpha splicing. Outside of lab, Natalie enjoys cooking, hiking, biking, a good cup of coffee, and bossa nova.

Research Experience

2017–2019 Master’s Student, Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Identifying cell-type specific NRXN1α isoforms using hiPSC-derived NPCs
2016–2017 Undergraduate Researcher, Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Selected Publications

1. Barretto, N.*, Zhang, H.*, Fernando, M., Powel, S., Zhang, S., Flaherty, E., Ho, S., Slesinger, P., Duan, J., Brennand, K.J. (2020). ASCL1– and DLX2-induced GABAergic neurons from hiPSC-derived NPCs. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 334, 108548.
2. Gregory, JA., Hoelzli, E., Abdelaal, R., Braine, C., Cuevas. M., Halpern, M., Barretto, N., Schrode, N., Akbalik, G., Kang, K., Cheng, E., Bowles, K., Lotz, S., Goderie, S., Karch, C.M., Temple, S., Goate, A., Brennand, K.J., Phatnani, H. (2020). Cell Type-Specific In Vitro Gene Expression Profiling of Stem Cell-Derived Neural Models. Cells, 9(6), 1406.
3. Flaherty, E., Zhu, S., Barretto, N., Cheng, E., Deans, M., Fernando, M., Schrode, N., Francoeur, N., Antoine, A., Alganem, K., Halpern, M., Deikus, G., Shah, H., Fitzgerald, M., Ladran, I., Gochman, P., Rapoport, J., Tsankiva, N., Mccullumsmith, R., Hoffman, G.E., Sebra, R., Fang, G., Brennand, K.J. (2019). Neuronal impact of patient-specific aberrant NRXN1𝛼 Nature Genetics, 51(12), 1679–1690.
4. Schrode, N., Ho, S., Yamamuro, K., Dobbyn, A., Huckins, L., Rodriguez- Matos, M., Cheng, E., Deans, M., Flaherty, E., Barretto, N., Topol, A., Alganem, K., Abadali, S., Gregory, J., Hoelzli, E., Singh, V., Girish, D., Aronow, B., Mccullumsmith, R., Hoffman, G., Stahl, E., Morishiro, H., Sklar, P., Brennand, K.J. (2019). Synergistic effects of common schizophrenia risk variants. Nature Genetics, 51(10), 1475–1485.
5. Ho, S., Hartley, B.J., Flaherty, E., Rajarajan, P., Abdelaal, R., Obiorah, I., Barretto, N., Muhammad, H., Phatnani, H.P., Akbarian, S. and Brennand, K.J. (2017). Evaluating Synthetic Activation and Repression of Neuropsychiatric-Related Genes in hiPSC-Derived NPCs, Neurons, and Astrocytes. Stem Cell Reports. 9(2), 615-628.