Kerry Tucker publishes in inaugural issue of ‘Neurogenesis’

The laboratory of Kerry L. Tucker, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, has published an article in the inaugural issue of a new online journal, Neurogenesis, titled "Regulation of proliferation and histone acetylation in embryonic neural precursors by CREB/CREM signaling."(Neurogenesis 1(1): 1-13).

The article discusses a study by Tucker and his co-authors in which they investigated an embryonic function for mutant mice missing genes for transcription factors involved in fundamental processes of learning and memory, CREB and CREM.  The study showed that these factors are important for controlling cell division in the stem cells that generate the brain, and they do this through epigenetic modification of the DNA of the stem cells.