Nicole Aponte Santiago

Dr. Aponte Santiago studies the calcium signaling pathway, crucial for proper development and linked to human developmental diseases. During her Ph.D. at the Littleton lab at MIT, she investigated two subclasses of motoneurons with different responses to calcium activity and developed a system to study synaptic competition. However, studying calcium signaling in the whole embryo is challenging due to the complex processes involved and the unique responses of different cell types to calcium signals. To address these challenges, Dr. Aponte Santiago joined Dr. Dan Wagner’s lab at UCSF as a postdoctoral researcher. She combines classic molecular biology techniques with novel whole-embryo transcriptomic analysis to study these processes. Her research uses zebrafish as a model organism to identify critical cell types and molecular components involved in early development. This work could lead to new therapeutic strategies for developmental disorders related to calcium signaling abnormalities, offering hope for future treatments.

• Calcium signaling
• Genetics
• Model organisms

• Development
• Molecular biology
• Neuroscience

• Committee Member, Annual BRAIN Meeting Program Committee
• Sub-Committee Member, BRAIN Meeting Training/ DEIA

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), PhD in Biology, 2020
• University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras (UPR-RP), BS in Cellular Molecular Biology, 2013

• Postdoctoral Fellow, UCSF

• BRAIN Initiative Fellow: Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (F32)
• Life Sciences Research Foundation Finalist
• UCSF IRACDA Associated Scholar
• Graduate Women of Excellence Award
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP)

• Jetti, S.K., Crane, A.B., Akbergenova, Y., Aponte-Santiago, N.A., Cunningham, K.L., Whittaker, C.A., Littleton, J.T. “Molecular Logic of Synaptic Diversity between Drosophila Tonic and Phasic Motoneurons.” Neuron, August. (2023)
• Sauvola, C.W., Akbergenova, Y., Cunningham, K.L., Aponte-Santiago, N.A., Littleton, J.T. The decoy SNARE Tomosyn sets tonic versus phasic release properties and is required for homeostatic synaptic plasticity. eLife 2021;10:e72841. (2021)
• Aponte-Santiago, N.A. & Littleton, J.T. Synaptic Properties and Plasticity Mechanisms of Invertebrate Tonic and Phasic Neurons. Frontiers in Physiology 2020;11:611982. (2020)