Congratulations to Yves De Koninck, Director of the CERVO Research Centre, winner of the Wilder Penfield Award, one of the Prix du Québec. (more…)
Archives
The official inauguration of the “À visage humain” exhibit took place on October 6, 2022 at the CERVO Brain Research Center. The exhibition “À visage humain” is part of a series of initiatives by the CERVO aimed at providing the Capitale-Nationale region and its scientific, cultural and community milieu with a unifying project that combines knowledge, arts, memory and mental health, all under the umbrella of innovation.
Learn more about the exhibition in this interview with Francine Saillant broadcast on TVA
https://www.facebook.com/tvaquebec/videos/783348649659338
and on the event webpage
Congratulations to Charles Morin for his leadership!
A research consortium led by Professor Charles Morin, from the School of Psychology and the CERVO Brain Research Centre, has received $3.8M in funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to conduct research on sleep and insomnia. This consortium brings together some thirty researchers who will combine their expertise to advance knowledge on these important determinants of individual and public health.
Read more about this story on the ULaval Nouvelles website (in French only)
Summary of the discovery published by Jean Hamann (ULaval News)
How does our brain learn? A study specifies the role of a neuromodulator, noradrenaline, in reinforcement learning
It is said that practice makes perfect. There is no doubt that this proverb is true, but the neural mechanisms by which repetition of a task can lead to an improvement in its execution are still largely unknown. A study published today in Nature lifts part of the veil on the subject and clarifies the role of a neuromodulator, noradrenaline, in this process.
The first author of this study, Vincent Breton-Provencher, from the Faculty of Medicine and the CERVO brain research centre at Laval University, undertook the research that led to this publication while doing a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Mriganka Sur’s team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Our work was aimed at understanding the functioning of the neural circuits that control noradrenaline and their involvement in task performance and learning reinforcement,” he says.
Noradrenaline is mainly produced by neurons in the locus coeruleus, an area located between the spinal cord and the brain. “The cell bodies of the neurons that produce noradrenaline are located in the locus coeruleus, but their axons extend into several areas of the brain. This is what allows them to modulate functions as varied as attention, arousal, vigilance, sleep, learning and reinforcement,” Breton-Provencher points out.
Read the rest of this news (in French) on the website ULaval Nouvelles
Read the original research article in Nature:
Vincent Breton-Provencher, Gabrielle T. Drummond, Jiesi Feng, Yulong Li & Mriganka Sur. Spatiotemporal dynamics of noradrenaline during learned behaviour. Nature (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04782-2
Congratulations to Laurence Dion-Albert, Prix Relève étoile Jacques-Genest from the FRQS!
2022-05-27Congratulations to Laurence Dion-Albert, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the CERVO Research Centre, under the supervision of Caroline Ménard, who has been awarded the FRQS Relève étoile Jacques-Genest award for May!
She wins this award for the publication
Vascular and blood-brain barrier-related changes underlie stress responses and resilience in female mice and depression in human tissue, published in : Nature Communications
Summary:
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and one in five people will be affected in their lifetime. The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is responsible for protecting the brain and preventing toxins, pathogens and harmful inflammatory molecules in the bloodstream from entering the brain. In addition, it allows water, nutrients and vitamins to pass through to the brain to feed the neurons. The laboratory where Laurence Dion-Albert works has previously shown alterations in the BBB in male mice exposed to chronic stress as well as in men with MDD. Interestingly, these changes were restricted to a region important for emotional control, the nucleus accumbens. In this study, Laurence Dion-Albert and colleagues report for the first time alterations of the BBB in the prefrontal cortex of female mice and women with depression. This region is involved in anxiety and self-esteem. The results demonstrate that BBB dysfunction plays an important role in the stress response in mice and in MDD in humans in a gender-specific manner. These results could lead to the discovery of new mechanisms and innovative diagnostic tools in mental health to help men and women worldwide.
Congratulations to Archana Gengatharan of Armen Saghatelyan’s lab for winning the Marlene Reimer award, which is the first place in the Canadian Association for Neuroscience (CAN) – Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction (CIHR-INMHA) Brain Star Award competition for the following article:
Archana Gengatharan , Sarah Malvaut , Alina Marymonchyk , Majid Ghareghani , Marina Snapyan , Judith Fischer-Sternjak , Jovica Ninkovic , Magdalena Götz , Armen Saghatelyan. Adult neural stem cell activation in mice is regulated by the day/night cycle and intracellular calcium dynamics. Cell. Volume 184, issue 3. P709-722.E13
Read a summary of the discovery on the CAN website:
Stem cells activation in the brain is regulated by day and night
The editor of the scientific journal Scientific Reports has published a list of key articles in the field of super-resolution microscopy, including a publication by Paul De Koninck, Flavie Lavoie-Cardinal and their team at the CERVO research center.
Super-resolution microscopy encompasses optical microscopy techniques that produce images in which structures are laterally resolved beyond the diffraction limit of light (250nm). These techniques have revolutionized fluorescence microscopy and enabled probing cellular structure in unprecedented detail. Since Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner were awarded the 2014 Nobel prize in Chemistry for developing super resolved fluorescence microscopy, the methodologies have continuously evolved and are becoming increasingly amenable to real time and quantitative imaging. Super resolution imaging is now also being used in conjunction with other microscopy techniques to further extend their abilities to uncover nanoscale detail. This Collection showcases the latest research presenting applications of super resolution microscopy—to characterize cellular ultrastructure and dynamics, in medicine—as well as technological improvements and quantitative methods applied to the techniques.
View the Editor’s choice: super-resolution microscopy here
Read the article by the CERVO teams here:
Lavoie-Cardinal, F., Bilodeau, A., Lemieux, M. et al. Neuronal activity remodels the F-actin based submembrane lattice in dendrites but not axons of hippocampal neurons. Sci Rep 10, 11960 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-68180-2
Some cellular mechanisms involved in pain are sex -specific
Contrary to popular belief, gender differences in pain perception are not subjective. A study published today in the journal Brain by researchers from Carleton University and Laval University provides tangible proof of this. The team’s work reveals that the neural mechanisms that lead to chronic inflammatory pain are not the same in men and women.
We have known for a long time that the prevalence of chronic pain is higher in women,” says Yves De Koninck, from the Faculty of Medicine and the CERVO research centre at Laval University. For example, women account for about 90% of fibromyalgia cases. They are also twice as likely to suffer from headaches and migraines. They are also known to be more sensitive to mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical stimuli. Strangely, research seems to have long ignored these gender differences.
Indeed, the vast majority of studies that have explored the neuronal causes of pain have not paid particular attention to women,” says Professor De Koninck. “In animals, the studies have mainly been carried out in males. As for human studies, they have too often mixed male and female subjects indiscriminately.
Professor De Koninck’s team and Professor Michael Hildebrand’s team at Carleton University set out to fill this gap by studying the neural mechanisms underlying chronic inflammatory pain. To do this, they used spinal cord tissue taken from 10 women and 12 men after their death, as well as male and female rats, which they put in the presence of BDNF, a protein that increases sensitivity to pain.
Results? BDNF stimulated the mechanisms leading to hypersensitivity in human male tissues and in male rats, but not in human female tissues or in female rats. “We did the same experiments on female rats that no longer produced sex hormones following ovarian resection. In these females, BDNF then produced the same effects as in males,” emphasises Yves De Koninck.
Another study published last week in the Journal of Neuroscience by Professor De Koninck’s team and Theodore Price’s team from the University of Texas revealed another sex difference related to pain in mice and rats. This time the researchers looked at a peptide, CGRP, which is involved in migraine.
“Our experiments have shown that this peptide exacerbates pain in females, but not in males. This could explain why the prevalence of headaches and migraines is higher in women,” says Professor De Koninck.
In addition to their importance for understanding the fundamental phenomena leading to chronic pain, the results of these studies deliver two important messages, says the researcher.
“The first message is that when designing our experiments, we need to keep in mind that there may be differences between the sexes. This means, among other things, providing enough subjects of each sex to be able to detect these differences.”
The second message is that the search for new pain treatments must target mechanisms that are common to both sexes. “If there are none, we need to find effective targets for each gender and develop appropriate treatments.”
Read the original version of this text by Jean Hamann (in French) on the ULaval nouvelles website
Read the original research article here:
Sexual dimorphism in a neuronal mechanism of spinal hyperexcitability across rodent and human models of pathological pain. Annemarie Dedek, Jian Xu, Louis-Étienne Lorenzo, Antoine G Godin, Chaya M Kandegedara, Geneviève Glavina, Jeffrey A Landrigan, Paul J Lombroso, Yves De Koninck, Eve C Tsai, Michael E Hildebrand. Brain. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awab408. Published: 23 March 2022
A team led by Caroline Ménard of the CERVO Research Centre and Laval University may have discovered why major depression affects women and men differently. The team’s analyses of the brains of people who, at the time of their death, were suffering from depression revealed the presence of alterations in the brain barrier, but these alterations were located in different brain regions depending on gender. The team’s work, published today in Nature Communications, also identified a potential biomarker for depression in women.
A recent article on the ULaval news site describes this discovery: Read the article by Jean Hamann (in French) here
Read the original research article in Nature Communications (open access):
Dion-Albert L, Cadoret A, Doney E, Kaufmann FN, Dudek KA, Daigle B, Parise LF, Cathomas F, Samba N, Hudson N, Lebel M; Signature Consortium, Campbell M, Turecki G, Mechawar N, Menard C. Vascular and blood-brain barrier-related
changes underlie stress responses and resilience in female mice and depression in human tissue. Nat Commun. 2022 Jan 10;13(1):164. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27604-x
The prevalence of these psychological health problems doubled during this period
Has the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic made you sleepless, anxious or depressed? If it makes you feel better, you are far from alone. An international study just published in the journal Sleep Medicine provides a measure of the surge in these problems during this trying time.
Led by Professor Charles Morin of Laval University’s School of Psychology and the CERVO Brain Research Center, the study gathers statistics on the prevalence of insomnia, anxiety and depression in 13 countries on 4 continents between May and August 2020. “Several independent studies conducted at the beginning of the pandemic in different countries had reported high prevalences of insomnia, anxiety and depression. However, these prevalences were highly variable because the methodology of the studies was not uniform,” says Charles Morin.
Read the rest of this article by Jean Hamann on the ULaval News website (in French)
View the original scientific publication:
Charles M. Morin, Bjørn Bjorvatn, Frances Chung, Brigitte Holzinger, Markku Partinen, Thomas Penzel, Hans Ivers, Yun Kwok Wing, Ngan Yin Chan, Ilona Merikanto, Sergio Mota-Rolim, Tainá Macêdo, Luigi De Gennaro, Damien Léger, Yves Dauvilliers, Giuseppe Plazzi, Michael R. Nadorff, Courtney J. Bolstad, Mariusz Sieminski, Christian Benedict, Jonathan Cedernaes, Yuchi Inoue, Fang Han, Colin A. Espie,
Insomnia, anxiety, and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic: an international collaborative study, Sleep Medicine, Volume 87, 2021, Pages 38-45,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389945721004196