Welcome to the Limon Lab

Malfunctioning synapses steal life away from millions of people worldwide every day. Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, depression, autism spectrum disorders are all considered synaptic disorders. Why and how does synaptic activity go astray and produce these debilitating conditions? No one knows the answer for sure. However, as our understanding of the intrinsic nature of abnormal synaptic activity in these conditions grows the closer we are to the answers.

Our long-term goal is to elucidate the physiological and pathophysiological processes that underlie synaptic and extrasynaptic remodeling of inhibitory and excitatory signaling in neurological and psychiatric disorders. With this information, it should be possible to advance knowledge of synaptic interactions in health and the rearrangements produced by disease to a point where rational strategies can be developed for effective treatments of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

We use an integrative synaptic interaction model that depicts the electrical and chemical stimuli and responses of neural receptors and ion channels in the multiple dimensions of time, space and domain (gene and protein expression, biophysics, pharmacology and physiology). We use electrophysiological data from reactivated, native synaptic receptors extracted from healthy and diseased human brains by Microtransplantation of Synaptic Membranes (MSM), and by integrating this functional information with transcriptomic and proteomic data from the same cohort. This integrative approach has provided our group with deeper understanding of molecular processes that are most likely occurring in living human brains affected by neurological and psychiatric disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and autism.