Deepening our understanding of the retina with single-cell genomics

At this year’s Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum, BioTechniques Managing Editor, Ebony Torrington, interviewed Karthik Shekhar, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (CA, USA), about his lab’s work using single-cell genomics to understand the nervous system, specifically the visual system. Shekhar’s research group is at the intersection of machine learning, neurobiology and molecular neuroscience. Pursuing the nature–nurture question, Shekhar and colleagues strive to understand neural diversity in the brain and how this diversity is organized, how it comes to be during early development, and the role of intrinsic versus extrinsic mechanisms and experience. Furthermore, his lab...