Research Interests

Neural stem cells self-renew to maintain their pool, yet differentiate into enormous functionally and morphologically distinct neurons and glia. Proper regulation of self-renewal and differentiation has profound consequences in development and homeostasis. Decreased neurogenesis could lead to defects in brain development resulting in neurodevelopmental disorders like microcephaly, epilepsy and autism. On the other hand, an increase in self-renewal could lead to malignancies such as cancer. We are interested in identifying the mechanisms and the molecular players underlying neural stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. To study these processes, we use Drosophila developing brain and human neuronal stem cells as model systems. We utilize state of the art genome editing tools and a diverse set of cell and molecular biology approaches.

Selected Publications

A.A. Kakade,S. Gupta,A. Johnson,R. Varghese,H. Adicherla, & S. Nagarkar-Jaiswal, Inseparable/IER3IP1 are essential for cytokinesis in Drosophila neuroblasts and human cells, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (39) e2415361122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415361122 (2025)

Cheramangalam RN, Anand T, Pandey P, Balasubramanian D, Varghese R, Singhal N, Nagarkar Jaiswal N#, Jaiswal M# (2023) Bendless is essential for PINK1-Park mediated Mitofusin degradation under mitochondrial stress caused by loss of LRPPRC. eLife.88318.3

Nagarkar-Jaiswal S.#, Manivannan SN, Zuo Z., Bellen HJ#. Flip-Flop, a facile, cell cycle-independent, conditional gene inactivation strategy differentially tagging wild-type and mutant cells eLife 6:e26420

Skinner SO*, Xu H*, Nagarkar-Jaiswal S, Freire PR, Zwaka TP, Golding I. Single-cell analysis of transcription kinetics across the cell cycle. eLife 5:e12175

Nagarkar-Jaiswal S*, DeLuca S*, Lee PT, Lin WW, Pan H, Zuo Z, Lv Z, Spradling AC, Bellen HJ (2015). A genetic toolkit for tagging intronic MiMICs containing genes. eLife 4:e08469

Carrillo CA*,Ozkan E*, Menon KP*, Nagarkar-Jaiswal S, Jeon M, Bellen HJ, Garcia CK, Zinn K. Control of synaptic connectivity in Drosophila by a network of IgSF surface proteins. Cell 163:1770-1782 (*equal contribution)

(# Co-corresponding authors)(*equal contribution)