Among this year’s new members, there is just one scientist working in Portugal – and he is at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.

Eduardo Moreno, from the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), in Lisbon, is one of the 53 scientists to have been elected this year permanent members of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), this institution announced today (Monday, May 14th). He is the only new permanent member working in Portugal.

For years, Eduardo Moreno has been unraveling how competition for survival between cells in an organism plays out to make it develop healthily – or, as it ages, give rise to cancer and other diseases.

For me, [cell competition] was just natural selection at work inside the organism. – Eduardo Moreno

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Do the microbes that live inside our gut have access to areas of our body we might feel more private about, such as our brain?

Scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown discovered that they actually do!

In this episode of Science Snapshots, Carlos Ribeiro, head of the Behaviour and Metabolism lab, talks about how his team found that gut bacteria “speak” with the brain to control a key aspect of behaviour: food choice.

Why do treatments with antidepressants like Prozac seem to work better when combined with behavioral therapies, which promote the learning of positive behaviors by the depressed patient? A new study suggests a possible explanation.

The study found that serotonin enhances the speed of learning. When serotonin neurons were activated artificially, using light, it made mice quicker to adapt their behavior in a situation that required such flexibility. Zach Mainen

When she was a young graduate student in biotechnology, Luísa Vasconcelos decided to do neuroscience research for a living. She hasn’t stopped since. At the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, she studies the underpinnings of innate behavior.

Behavior allows us to study a problem at several levels, and this is attractive because, ultimately, it is rewarding to see the whole picture. – Luísa Vasconcelos

Carlos Ribeiro and Leopoldo Petreanu have been awarded Health Research la Caixa Grants of nearly 500,000 euros each to coordinate scientific projects. The grants are attributed to by the Foundation of la Caixa bank, Spain’s third largest financial institution. This is the first edition to include project coordinators working in Portugal.

A third researcher, Mireia Castilho, has been awarded 25,000 euros to collaborate with another la Caixa-funded project, this one coordinated by a group based in Bilbao, Spain.

How can scarce resources sustain the multitude of species that exists on Earth? Despite recent progress, this enigma of biodiversity has not yet been solved. Now, scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon, Portugal, developed a new mathematical model which may be the answer.

These ideas are still largely theoretical, so we need to test how well the competition mechanisms proposed in the paper describe what happens when real species compete, but early results look quite promising. – Andres Laan

Fight, flee, or freeze; when faced with a threat, everyone, from mice to humans, are certain to choose one of these three strategies. Though critical for survival, we are still at a loss as to how the brain chooses which strategy to apply in any given instance. In this new study, a team of scientists at CR not only identified variables that lead the brain to apply a specific strategy, but also uncovered a particular pair of neurons crucial for this process.

A team at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown has been awarded a Proof of Concept grant of 149.820 euros by the European Research Council (ERC) to develop a prototype for a new system of behaviour analysis, based on sensors similar to those used in cell phones to detect movement, that will make it possible to accurately and automatically measure human behavior related to nervous system disorders.

How can our brain discriminate and identify a particular face among a virtually infinite number of extremely similar faces? Doris Tsao discovered how neurons in our brain encode faces. With her team, she effectively “cracked the neural code” – the Rosetta Stone, as she calls it – for faces. Recently, she came to the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown to talk about her work.

We think that, physically, the brain’s mechanism for coding faces is exactly like the RGB code for colors. – Doris Tsao