An odyssey in the space of molecules, genes, biology and brain: an interview with Sabine Cordes

Sabine Cordes is currently Senior Investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, where she studies the genes involved in craniofacial and neuronal development and psychiatric disorders. Although now renowned as an excellent mouse geneticist and neurobiologist, she is actually a biochemist by training. Indeed, she started her career at the Department of Biochemistry at Berkeley, University of California, studying ethylene-induced gene expression during tomato fruit ripening with Robert L. Fischer. She then became fascinated by brain development and decided to join Greg Barsh’s lab at Stanford University to work specifically on hindbrain segmentation. Her interest in psychiatric disorders was, in her own words, ‘accidental’. In this interview, Sabine recounts the interesting steps that took her from the study of chemistry and molecules to that of genes and mouse genetics, to researching on neurodevelopment and mood disorders. She also shares with us her personal forward-looking view of biomedical science, based on her own experience and on the impact of new advances that are revolutionising our understanding of cell biology and neurobiology.