Günther K.H. Zupanc
Zupanc (born 20 October 1958) is a German-American neurobiologist, researcher, university teacher, book author, journal editor, and educational reformer.
[1][2] Before enrolling in college, Zupanc worked as a journalist for the Münchner Merkur, a major daily newspaper in Munich, Germany, where he specialized in science writing.
Zupanc has made important contributions to several disciplines within biology, including neuroethology, neuroanatomy, neuroendocrinology, developmental neurobiology, and computational neuroscience.
[6] As part of his efforts to establish the brown ghost knifefish (Apteronotus leptorhynchus) as a powerful model organisms for the study of behavior and neural plasticity, his laboratory performed (in collaboration with the group of Jeffrey N. Agar of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University) a de novo assembly, annotation, and proteomics validation of the central nervous system transcriptome of this species.
[8] The results of this research have implications beyond this study, suggesting that astrocytes play an important role in the regulation of the activity of neural oscillators, including those that control a sexually dimorphic behavior.
According to this hypothesis, neurogenesis in the adult central nervous system is the result of the continuous generation of new muscle fibers and sensory receptor cells in the periphery.
[19][20][21] By employing a proteomics approach, Zupanc and his associates performed the first large-scale analysis in teleost fish of changes in global protein expression after brain trauma and spinal cord injury.
[22][23][24] In an expansion of their research on adult neurogenesis, the laboratory of Zupanc discovered the first vertebrate organism that lacks any of the hallmarks of brain senescence common to humans and all mammalian species examined thus far.
By integrating the big data set collected through such experimental work, Zupanc and his collaborators (notably Iulian Ilieş, Dávid Lehotzky, and Rifat Sipahi succeeded in building the first mathematical and computational models of stem-cell-driven tissue growth in the spinal cord during adult development and regeneration.
[27][28] These models provide an important theoretical framework for better understanding tissue growth in the intact and regenerating central nervous system.
[29][30] Using this approach, the team has provided a theoretical explanation for the seemingly paradoxical effect that in lymphoma and prostate cancer cell-death-inducing chemotherapy sometimes induces tumors, instead of suppressing them.
[31] As a translational spin-off of the basic research carried out in the laboratory of Günther Zupanc, his group developed a novel in vivo assay for screening and characterizing water-soluble anesthetic compounds.
