Biography
Lawrence T. Reiter, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine in 1997. During his postdoctoral work he laid the groundwork for using Drosophila as a model organism for studying human genetic disease, showing that ~75% of all human disease related genes have significant homologues in flies. This work has been cited >1300 times and continues to be a strong justification for human disease modeling in Drosophila. He was also a faculty member in the Department of Neurology at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center for 19 years before joining Tulane.
Translational research investigating the molecular causes of human neurogenetic disease using Drosophila models has been the focus of his work since starting his laboratory in 2005. He is an expert on chromosome 15q disorders including Angelman, Prader-Willi and Duplication 15q syndrome using Drosophila and dental pulp stem cells (DPSC) models.
His current NIH grant is to identify protein substrates of UBE3A in flies and mice. He also recently completed a medium throughput compound screen for seizure suppression using the glial specific Dube3a over-expression model. This screening project produced a manuscript that describes the chemical suppression of seizures in a fly model of 15q Duplication syndrome through the stimulation of 5HT1A receptors in glia, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. Recently, he has initiated an off-label trial of Dup15q specific anti-epileptics taking place in Italy.
Dr. Reiter is a member of ASHG and GSA. He is on the editorial board for Frontiers in Genetics and has published >75 peer reviewed research papers.
Contributions
PubMed listing for Dr. Lawrence T. Reiter.
