The exploration of alternative therapeutics for hard-to-treat mental health disorders has brought into focus an array of psychedelics such as psilocybin, present in ‘magic mushrooms’, and LSD, substances once associated more with counterculture than clinical practice. Alongside ‘atypical’ psychedelics like ketamine and MDMA, these substances are increasingly being recognised for their potential therapeutic attributes.

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.

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.

A study published today, April 13th, in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides a surprising answer to this question by showing that, rather than committing to a single strategy, the brain can compute multiple alternative decision strategies simultaneously.

The study, led by Fanny Cazettes and senior authors Zachary Mainen and Alfonso Renart, at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, performed a specially-designed experiment which used a kind of “virtual reality” setup for mice, in which the animals were tasked with searching for water in a virtual world. 

In Portugal, the winning scientists are Isabel Gordo (Gulbenkian Institute of Science, IGC), Maria Manuel Mota (João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine, iMM), Mariana Pinho (ITQB-NOVA) and Henrique Veiga-Fernandes (Champalimaud Foundation). Each will receive between €2.5M and €3.5M for the development of research projects over the next five years.

Scientists and doctors at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon, have joined efforts to reduce the toxicity of so-called “neoadjuvant chemoradiation” – the combination of chemotherapy plus radiotherapy – for the treatment of rectal cancer. If further confirmed, their results, published a few months ago in the journal Frontiers in Oncology, could in the not-so-distant future help many patients with rectal cancer, especially the more elderly and frail ones.

It’s been over 20 years since neuroimaging studies – using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a widely-used technology to capture live videos of brain activity – have been detecting brain-wide complex patterns of correlated brain activity that appear disrupted in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders. These patterns form spontaneously, even at rest when no particular task is being performed, and have been detected not only in humans but also across mammals, including monkeys and rodents. 

When we try walking in a straight line with our eyes closed, after a few steps forward we inevitably deviate from our intended path. But somehow our brain knows it – senses it –, and enables us to more or less correct that deviation error. To do it, we decide to inflect to our body a movement toward the opposite side of the deviation as we take our next step. 

This competitive initiative supports excellent group leaders who are in the process of establishing their laboratories. The awarded early-career scientists receive 50,000 euros annually for three to five years and can apply for additional grants of up to 10,000 euros per year.