
In 2012, researchers in the Boston Children’s Hospital lab of Christopher Walsh, MD, PhD, reported a study of three unrelated families that had children with microcephaly. All had smaller-than-normal brains — both the cerebrum and the cerebellum were reduced in size— and all had mutations that knocked out the function of a gene called CHMP1A.
It was clear that CHMP1A is needed for the brain to grow to its proper dimensions. But the study stopped there.
“Then I came along, and my goal was to figure out what this gene is doing in brain during development, and why, when you lose it, you have a small brain,” says Michael Coulter, MD, PhD, who joined the Walsh lab as a student in 2012. …