The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a widely used model in neuroscience due to its relatively small brain, which is easier to study than those of larger animals. Despite its size, the Drosophila brain is capable of forming memories, learning, and engaging in sophisticated social behaviours. Remarkably, fruit flies perform calculations as complex as vertebrates, but with a brain that has far fewer neurons. They share about 60% of their genes with humans, and 75% of human genetic diseases have parallels in flies.

The ERC Starting Grant is one of Europe’s most prestigious and competitive research awards, designed to support promising early-career researchers who have the potential to become leaders in their fields. Ianuş will receive €2M over the next five years to develop her research project at King’s College London, where she recently joined as a Lecturer in Healthcare Engineering.

How do we learn to make sense of our environment? Over time, our brain builds a hierarchy of knowledge, with higher-order concepts linked to the lower-order features that comprise them. For instance, we learn that cabinets contain drawers and that Dalmatian dogs have black-and-white patches, and not vice versa. This interconnected framework shapes our expectations and perception of the world, allowing us to identify what we see based on context and experience.

Using zebrafish “Avatars”, an animal model developed by the Cancer Development and Innate Immune Evasion lab at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), led by Rita Fior, Mayra Martínez-López – a former PhD student at the lab now working at the Universidad de las Américas in Quito, Ecuador – and colleagues studied the initial steps of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine’s action on bladder cancer cells.

Now, Megan Carey from the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), Mónica Sousa from the Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S), Ricardo Henriques from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), and Rui Oliveira from IGC and the Instituto Universitário de Ciências Psicológicas Sociais e da Vida (ISPA), become EMBO Mem

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a spectacular tool that has been in development for the last decades; its role in our lives is already pervasive and will inevitably grow; and, most importantly, we can, through regulation, avoid its abuses (such as fake news and the manipulation of human beings). Indeed, whatever the future of AI is to be, we have the power to choose – wisely – to use it for the common good.

Rita Fior, leader of the Cancer Development and Innate Immune Evasion Group at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), has been studying for several years the power of zebrafish “avatars”, or zAvatars, of cancer patients to help guide therapeutic decisions. The goal: to predict individual cancer treatment outcomes, thus enabling the selection of the best available chemotherapy treatment for each patient.

Every day, we make countless decisions based on sounds without a second thought. But what exactly happens in the brain during such instances? A new study from the Renart Lab, published in Current Biology, takes a look under the hood. Their findings deepen our understanding of how sensory information and behavioural choices are intertwined within the cortex — the brain’s outer layer that shapes our conscious perception of the world.

“When I explain to my friends and family the rigorous regulations in place to ensure ethical treatment of experimental animals, they seem surprised.
 
It is important that people know that researchers that use animals are obliged to have appropriate qualifications and training. That scientific projects are evaluated to ensure that the use of animals is needed, beneficial and that no unnecessary harm is inflicted. And that the highest standards of housing conditions must be provided by the facilities where animals are housed.
 

A study published in mid-April in the journal Nature Communications by Leopoldo Petreanu and his team, from the Cortical Circuits lab at Champalimaud Research, concludes that sensory processing by the visual cortex’s is not purely visual. More to the point, the study shows that, right from the early stages of sensory processing, the visual cortex integrates information from other sensory modalities, such as sounds.