The new call for applying for the PhD Course in Neuroscience (39th cohort) will run from 9th May to 7th June 2023, 1:00 pm CET.

The Neuroscience PhD course covers diverse neuroscience fields, such as circuits and systems, affective, computational, translational and clinical neuroscience, cognitive, behavioral and neuroimaging. PhD students will find a multidisciplinary environment, ranging from bioengineering to medicine, from mathematics to neurobiology, from physics to psychology and statics, and cutting-edge facilities.

For this call there are at least 13 positions available and more than 50 research lines to choose from for planning the research project.

General information about PhD calls and admissions

Admission information about PhD in Neuroscience

Research lines for project proposal

Deadline for application submitting: 7 June 2023, 1:00 pm CET.

The Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) has recently cited prof. Semenza’s work on their monthly newsletter. Here is the excerpt:

How brain damage can elevate a politician to an icon

by Gert van Dijk and Roelien Bastiaanse

Brain damage can evoke odd, sometimes bizarre changes in cognitive functioning that fascinate everyone. Neurologists were among the first to share that fascination of such ‘experiments of nature’ and used the powers of observation and analysis to increase knowledge of how the brain works. Over time, neurologists somehow either lost interest in the subject or no longer allowed themselves the time to sit and think, so it fell to others to study these particular observations, which are pearls for science while being disasters to patients.

A third of people suffering from major depressive disorder do not experience a significant improvement in their symptoms even after adequate treatment with two different antidepressant medications.

This common condition, termed treatment-resistant depression (TRD), severely affects the quality of life of millions of people worldwide. TRD is of utmost clinical relevance given the impact of residual depressive symptoms on functioning, the higher risk of recurrence, the lower chances of remission, and the risk of suicide (which is at least twice the rate of those with nonresistant depression), causing long-lasting interpersonal problems and social costs. Given its epidemiological and clinical relevance and the little consensus on whether the neurobiological underpinnings of TRD differ from treatment-sensitive depression (TSD), we aimed to highlight the convergent morphometric and functional neuroimaging correlates of TRD.

Recent evidence suggests that the body image disturbances often observed in patients with anorexia nervosa also extends to the body schema. According to the embodiment approach, the body schema is not only involved in motor execution, but also in tasks that only require a mental simulation of a movement such as motor imagery, mental rotation of bodies, and visuospatial perspective-taking. The aim of the present study was to assess the ability of patients with anorexia in mentally simulate movements.

The sample included 52 patients with acute anorexia and 62 healthy controls.

Spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA) is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by the abnormal expansion of polyglutamine (PolyQ)-encoding CAG triplets in the androgen receptor (AR) gene. AR binds to testosterone and its more potent derivative dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which trigger the activation of androgen receptor and the transcription of genes responsive to testosterone. Several enzymes in the cells (called kinases) can add chemical modifications (phosphorylation) to transcription factors to tightly regulate specific gene expression programs. On the contrary, phosphatases do the opposite job and remove phosphorylation from these proteins. Working together in a concerted way, kinases and phosphatases modify stability, cellular localization and function of transcription factors.

Un premio a giovani ricercatori/ricercatrici impegnati nel campo delle malattie neurologiche.

Il premio nasce con un duplice obiettivo. Da un lato si propone di valorizzare i giovani ricercatori e le giovani ricercatrici che operano nel settore delle malattie neurologiche in strutture, università od organizzazioni di ricerca della regione Veneto, territorio di riferimento dell’Associazione di promozione
sociale EsserVI. Inoltre, questo premio si propone di mantenere alta l’attenzione della società su queste patologie, per continuare a dare voce alle migliaia di persone colpite da queste malattie invalidanti. In un paese come l’Italia, che conta oltre un milione di persone che vivono con demenza e circa 3 milioni direttamente o indirettamente coinvolte nell’assistenza dei loro cari, la ricerca riveste un ruolo di fondamentale importanza.

Professore di Neurologia dell’Università di Padova e direttore della Clinica Neurologica dell’Azienda Ospedaliera, è Maurizio Corbetta a ottenere, con un gruppo composto da altri 3 Principal Investigators provenienti dall’Università Statale di Milano e dall’Università Pompeu Fabra e l’ICREA di Barcellona, un finanziamento di quasi 10 milioni di Euro nello schema Synergy Grant

https://www.unipd.it/news/erc-synergy-grant-10-milioni-euro-progetto-nemesis-universit-padova

Reduced approach motivation, indexed by reduced emotional responding to pleasant stimuli, and increased cognitive elaboration of unpleasant stimuli, are increasingly considered putative risk factors for depression. A novel approach to simultaneously examine these two processes is to examine time-frequency delta and theta power while participants are exposed to emotional pictures. Indeed, delta power appears to have a functional role in monitoring the motivational relevance of affective cues and in the identification of pleasant/rewarding stimuli and is generated by subcortical regions involved in the motivational system. Whereas theta power reflects the processing of salient events and can be employed to assess cognitive processing during the viewing of affective content.

The study ‘Recovery of neural dynamics criticality in personalized whole brain models of stroke‘ published in Nature Communications, fruit of an international collaboration among physicists, neurologists, psychologists, and PNC members Samir Suweis, Marco Zorzi and Maurizio Corbetta, proposes the theory of brain criticality to explain brain-behavior relationships in neurological patients.

Criticality is a physical state at the transition between order and disorder, and previous studies had shown that healthy brains work at criticality.

This study shows that patients affected by stroke present at three months decreased levels of neural activity, decreased entropy, and decreased strength of functional connections.