New consortium consisting of researchers from six Dutch knowledge institutions, coordinated by the CNCR and Radboud UMC, has been awarded with a grant of 4 million euros from ZonMW, to develop new research methods to improve treatment for neurodevelopmental disorders.

Wiep Scheper talks about her research to Alzheimer’s in the latest podcast of Brainwave, listen to it here!

Douglas Wightman (PhD student CNCR-CTG) publishes his first results in Nature Genetics. The large scale genetic study resulted in the discovery of novel genes and biological mechanisms that contribute to the pathogenesis of the disease.

Michel van den Oever and Esther Visser were involved in a study on compulsive alcohol use led by Markus Heilig and Esi Domi at the Linköping University in Sweden. Using the viral-TRAP technique developed by the CNCR Memory Circuits team, they identified a small population of PKC-delta-expressing neurons in the central amygdala that drives footshock-punished alcohol intake. Their findings are published in Science Advances.

Prof. dr. Danielle Posthuma has been awarded the 2021 Mensa Foundation Prize for her research directly identifying, for the first time, hundreds of human genes highly correlated to variations in intelligence.

Dr. Vivi Heine has been awarded the Open Competition ENW-M grant (700kEuro) for the development of 3D cell-instructive engineered stem cell models of human brain networks.

With the €30.000 grant Stephanie Dooves will use patient-derived stem cell models to study Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) disease mechanisms in the project “Targeting astrocytes to improve neuronal functioning in TSC”.

Alessandro Moro (CNCR-FGA) and colleagues identified the endocytic protein dynamin as a central regulator for neuromodulator secretion from dense core vesicles in mammalian neurons. This study is now published in Science Advances.

The global biopharmaceutical company UCB and an FGA team led by Ruud Toonen signed a 700k€ contract for joint research to develop new treatment strategies for genetic epilepsy syndromes.

A collaborative study by members of the Memory Circuits team together with the lab of Harm Krugers and Sylvie Lesuis (UvA) reveals that elevated levels of the stress hormone corticosterone induce an increase in the size of a hippocampal fear engram and this change underlies generalized expression of fear in a neutral environment. Their findings were published in Biological Psychiatry.