Blanca López Arrabal | MSc STUDENT
Blanca holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and currently she is pursuing her master’s degree in Molecular Biomedicine at the same university. Blanca has established a solid foundation in molecular biology with a particular interest in developmental biology. She has completed internships at prestigious institutions such as the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CBMSO UAM-CSIC), which further refined her skills in molecular biology and genetics. Her Bachelor’s project, conducted under the guidance of esteemed groups in the field, focused on tissue regeneration during Drosophila melanogaster larval development.
Ines gonzalez aspe | pHD STUDENT
Ines is a PhD student, specializing in progenitor diversity during the development of the nervous system. She completed her degree in Biology at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and pursued a master’s in Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University (Sweden). During her studies she carried out stays at Bristol University (UK) and CNB (Spain), broadening her expertise and inspiring her to explore biological processes in more depth. Her master’s thesis focused on homeobox gene expression in neuronal progenitors throughout development, laying the groundwork for her current research.
Ines joined the Neurorigins Lab in 2023. Her primary focus lies in understanding how neuronal diversity emerges during mouse cortical development. She studies the role of highly conserved genes that exhibit subtle variations across progenitors, including their posttranscriptional processing.
Jorge Garcia-Marques | Group Leader
Jorge graduated in Biological Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2005. For his PhD, he studied how different astroglial populations emerged during development in the mouse cerebral cortex. Jorge designed and optimized Star Track, a method based on the expression of combinations of fluorophores to specifically mark different lineages of astrocytes and NG2 cells. After stays at Yale University (USA) and the University of Geneva (Switzerland), Jorge received his PhD in Neuroscience from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2012.
In 2014 Jorge joined Tzumin Lee’s lab at Janelia Research Campus (Howard Hugues Medical Institute) for his postdoc. There he developed an innovative CRISPR/Cas9-based technology for the study of neuronal lineages in Drosophila: 1) CaSSA, to gain genetic access to specific neural progenitors based on the genetic intersection of different markers, and 2) CLADES, to mark neurons generated at different times with distinct combinations of fluorescent markers that follow a temporal sequence. Jorge moved to Spain in 2020 funded by a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to work in Marta Nieto’s lab (CNB-CSIC). After two years studying neural progenitor diversity in the mouse cerebral cortex, Jorge obtains a Ramon y Cajal contract to open his lab at the Cajal Institute in 2022.
SPAIN