ANA 2024 Best Thesis Award

Congratulation to Divyansh Gupta, winner of the ANA Best Thesis Award 2024!

Divyansh's research focuses on how our brains adapt to the complex visual world around us. In his PhD thesis, "Visual Adaptations to Natural Statistics," he explores how the early mammalian visual system—particularly the retina and Superior Colliculus (SC)—efficiently encodes the ever-changing natural world — from the bright sky to dim ground, or daylight to dusk. By developing a novel imaging method that's significantly faster and more affordable, the first part of this research revealed stark regional variations in how the retina processes visual scenes, optimizing visual encoding for the variations in statistics expected across different parts of the environment. This region-specific encoding continues in the downstream SC. These insights challenge our understanding of the eye as merely a passive sensor, demonstrating that predictive visual processing likely begins at the very edge of perception.

Further discoveries from this work show how the brain maintains accurate visual representations even as lighting conditions change drastically. Using high-density Neuropixels probes, the study revealed that neurons in the SC adjust their spike timing collectively, preserving invariant relative spike timing information across different luminance levels. These coordinated shifts in spiking can even be triggered by the subtle changes in light levels caused by pupil dynamics. Taken together, the research sheds light on how our sensory systems are fine-tuned for both evolutionary and moment-to-moment visual challenges, opening new doors for understanding perception, neural coding, and brain-inspired technologies. 

#Neuroscience #VisionScience #SensorySystems #NeuralCoding #PredictiveProcessing

You can read more about this work at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01280-0

ANA 2023 Best Thesis Award

Congratulation to Valeria Mussetto, winner of the ANA Best Thesis Award 2023!

Her PhD work in Jürgen Sandkühler’s lab at the Center for Brain Research in Vienna aimed at understanding the neurobiological substrates of the emotional components of pain. In particular, she focused on the lateral parabrachial nucleus, a brainstem center that is crucial for pain aversion, and investigated how neuro-glial transmission can be modulated in this area.

She discovered two novel forms of synaptic plasticity at glutamatergic synapses triggered by opioid administration, identifying the parabrachial nucleus as a new site of opioid-induced neuronal adaptations and describing the first direct evidence of plasticity in this structure. Additionally, Valeria’s work shed light into the largely unexplored roles of parabrachial glial cells, expanding our understanding of regional variability in neuro-immuno-glial networks in the brain and providing insights into the differential contribution of glia to specific aspects of pathological pain.

Valeria’s findings have significant implications for our understanding of opioid abuse and chronic pain mechanisms and can open new avenues for the treatment of these conditions. Details of her findings can be found on JPain and Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.