The Constant Chatter of Neurons

“The brain isn’t like a computer that turns off when it’s not doing a particular task”, explains Alfonso Renart, the senior author of the study published in eLife. “There’s always a kind of background hum, a baseline activity that can sometimes make it seem as if the brain is chattering to itself”. The team’s study lifts the lid on how that baseline activity, the continuous stream of electrical impulses sent by neurons, impacts behaviour and decision-making.

Many animals rely on smell to identify and locate objects in their surroundings and to respond appropriately. To investigate this phenomenon further, Greg Jefferis’ group in the LMB’s Neurobiology Division established a collaboration with the Behavior and Metabolism Lab, lead by Carlos Ribeiro, at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) and the group of  Drosophila Connectomics at Cambridge University and together studied Drosophila flies.

A Call for four fellowships for Master's Students is open at Fundação D. Anna de Sommer Champalimaud e Dr. Carlos Montez Champalimaud (Champalimaud Foundation) in the context of the project entitled “NextGenAI: Center for Responsible AI”, with reference “PRR” - from the call Nº “crAI 64”, funded by the “Agendas Mobilizadoras para a Inovação Empresarial, Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, Next Generation EU, IAPMEI”. We are a group of neuroscientists and machine learning experts at the Champalimaud Foundation with scientific partners covering a broad range of domain expertises.

The work, recently published in prestigious scientific journal PNAS, also shows that this molecule, which is transported by extracellular vesicles produced by tumor cells, directs these vesicles to the liver and lung, precisely the organs where it is common for stomach cancer metastases to appear. With these discoveries, the team contributed to the understanding of a new communication mechanism of tumor cells, thus identifying a potential new goal in developing targeted therapies to stop metastasis.