The European Research Council's (ERC) Starting Grants are prestigious and highly competitive awards, designed to enable young scientists to build their research team, and to carry out ambitious and innovative projects addressing unexplored scientific issues.
This year, the “StateNeuromod” project coordinated by Nikolas Karalis, a researcher at INSERM and new team leader at the Paris Brain Institute, has been selected for this prestigious 5-year ERC funding.
This project aims to understand how internal states are generated and modulated by the neurochemical balance in the brain. Being sleepy, hungry, afraid, or happy impacts our daily experience and defines our behavior and actions. Such internal states are characterized by unique signatures of activity across neural circuits and are actively shaped by neuromodulators, such as dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine.
At any moment, distinct combinations of neuromodulators are being released in each brain region. Changes in the neuromodulator balance have a powerful impact on the brain-wide configurations that underlie internal and behavioral states, while most mood disorders are associated with neuromodulator imbalance, and most therapeutic strategies attempt to restore this balance. However, how combinations of neuromodulators define distinct brain configurations and shape internal states remains unknown.
This research program will characterize the role of neuromodulators in defining internal states and will determine how state-specific neuromodulation sculpts neuronal dynamics. This progress will accelerate the integrative circuit-level understanding of brain function and will contribute to our fundamental understanding of the interplay of two core brain systems. This understanding will ultimately lead to the development of novel diagnostics and will suggest potential targets for novel therapeutic approaches in the form of target neural circuits and receptors for drug delivery or deep-brain stimula.
