Omer Bayraktar uses single cell and spatial transcriptomics technologies to characterize human brain cellular diversity in health and disease. During his training, he discovered neural stem cell patterning mechanisms and astrocyte layer diversity in the cerebral cortex. He started his independent research group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2018.

Bayraktar’s team has developed computational tools including cell2location to map cell types in spatial transcriptomics and cell2fate to resolve temporal cellular trajectories from single cell data. He is internationally funded by Wellcome LEAP, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative and CZI, and he steers spatial genomic strategy at the Sanger Institute.

Bayraktar’s work funded by SFARI is focused on exploring the convergence of autism susceptibility across regional neural circuits in the developing human brain. His team has generated a single cell spatial transcriptomic atlas of autism-associated gene expression in the developing human brain (https://www.stageatlas.org) and identified the convergent expression of these genes in the developing human thalamus and germinal zones.