Welcome to the Colón-Ramos Lab

A fundamental question in neuroscience is how synapses are assembled in living animals to produce behaviors and store memories. Our lab is focused on this question and uses the nematode C. elegans to examine the cell biological mechanisms by which synapses are precisely assembled during development, maintained during growth and modified during learning to store memories.

We can scrutinize the interplay between the cell biology of the synapse and behavior at three levels:

• A muscle-epidermis-glia signaling axis sustains synaptic specificity during allometric growth in Caenorhabditis elegans.
  
• The Journey of the Synaptic Autophagosome: A Cell Biological Perspective.
  
• A specific ATG-4 isoform is required for autophagic maturation and clearance in C. elegans neurons.
  
• Transforming the development and dissemination of cutting-edge microscopy and computation.
  
• Isotropic Light-Sheet Microscopy and Automated Cell Lineage Analyses to Catalogue Caenorhabditis elegans Embryogenesis with Subcellular Resolution.
  
• Maturation and Clearance of Autophagosomes in Neurons Depends on a Specific Cysteine Protease Isoform, ATG-4.2.