Neurogenomics

Research Group Steuernagel

The brain plays a central role in regulating metabolism and maintaining energy balance, coordinating signals from the body to manage hunger, energy expenditure, and fat storage. As obesity and related metabolic disorders continue to rise globally, understanding the neurocircuits that control these processes has become increasingly important. However, many questions about how different brain regions and cell types contribute to the regulation of metabolism remain unanswered. Computational approaches are a powerful way to analyze complex biological data, allowing us to explore these open questions.

The Neurogenomics group develops and applies computational biology and bioinformatics methods to enhance our understanding of the brain's role in regulating metabolism and energy balance. Moving beyond the established models of Agrp and Pomc neurons, our work focuses on characterizing the full spectrum of neuronal cell types in the hypothalamus and hindbrain. We study neurons at the transcriptomic, epigenomic, metabolomic, and spatial level, exploring how genetic and environmental factors influence them. We work closely with other groups at our institute to translate in-silico findings back into mechanistic biology, testing the hypotheses we derive from large biological data sets.

Our research addresses three main areas:

1. Mapping the cell type architecture of the hypothalamus and hindbrain
2. Effects of genetics and environment on metabolism-regulating cell types
3. Interpreting and visualizing large-scale OMICS Data

More about our research.

Selected publications

Human HYPOMAP: A comprehensive spatio-cellular map of the human hypothalamus.
John A. Tadross, Lukas Steuernagel, Georgina K.C. Dowsett, Katherine A. Kentistou, Sofia Lundh, Marta Porniece-Kumar, Paul Klemm, Kara Rainbow, Henning Hvid, Katarzyna Kania, Joseph Polex-Wolf, Lotte Bjerre-Knudsen, Charles Pyke, John R. B. Perry, Brian Y.H. Lam, Jens C. Brüning, Giles S.H. Yeo
Nature. (2025)

HypoMap—a unified single-cell gene expression atlas of the murine hypothalamus.
Lukas Steuernagel, Brian Y. H. Lam, Paul Klemm, Georgina K. C. Dowsett, Corinna A. Bauder, John A. Tadross, Tamara Sotelo Hitschfeld, Almudena del Rio Martin, Weiyi Chen, Alain J. de Solis, Henning Fenselau, Peter Davidsen, Irene Cimino, Sara N. Kohnke, Debra Rimmington, Anthony P. Coll, Andreas Beyer, Giles S. H. Yeo & Jens C. Brüning
Nat Metab 4, 1402–1419 (2022).