Janina Kupke has been awarded an NWO Veni grant for her project Bridging the epigenome and the synapse: resolving how memories persist. Memories depend on lasting changes in the connections between specific brain cells. Yet the proteins that form these connections are continuously replaced. With support of the Veni grant, Dr. Kupke will investigate whether epigenetic mechanisms help … Read more
Brains are not only shaped by our experience, but also by our genes. A new study led by neuroscientists Bernardo Maciel and Martijn van den Heuvel found that at least one-third of our brain connections are heritable.
Recently three postdoctoral researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and part of the BRAINSCAPES consortium, have received important funding. Alzheimer Nederland awarded €121,650 to Dr. Douglas Wightman (Complex Traits Genetics lab) to investigate genetic and environmental prediction of Alzheimer’s disease, while NWO awarded XS grants (€ 50,000) to both Dr. Sanne Beerens and Dr. Janina Kupke (Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology lab) to investigate how synapses on engram neurons (specific brain cells that store a memory) change to stabilize or modify memories. The three projects focus on advancing diagnostics and treatment of memory-related disorders, and build upon the work done in BRAINSCAPES.
How do small groups of neurons decide whether we approach a reward or avoid a threat? In a study published April 2nd 2025 in Nature Communications, Frank Meye’s lab at UMC Utrecht shows that distinct neuronal clusters (i.e. neuronal ensembles) in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) are essential for encoding positive and negative experiences.
In a study published in Biological Psychiatry, Cato Romero, Christiaan de Leeuw, Marijn Schipper, Bernardo Maciel, Martijn van den Heuvel, Rachel Brouwer, and Sophie van der Sluis from WP1 teamed up with colleagues Guus Smit and Frank Koopmans from WP3 to investigate why individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia tend to have shorter stature on average—a link first documented by Edward Burchard’s Physique and Psychosis nearly ninety years ago.
BRAINSCAPES scientists have developed a powerful new tool to pinpoint genes most likely causally linked to diseases, potentially accelerating drug development and advancing our understanding of disease biology.
Recently BRAINSCAPES member Dr. Danai Riga was awarded the Amsterdam UMC fellowship. The fellowship (750K euro) will support here in establishing her independent research line and expand her research group. As of the first of November, Dr. Riga starts her new position as team leader within the Functional Genomics (FGA) group of the CNCR. With this her official involvement in BRAINSCAPES come to an end, although her future research will further build upon findings acquired in the project. We took the opportunity to congratulate Dr. Riga and ask her a few questions.
Through a tightly organized cascade of patterning, specification and differentiation events, the human brain develops into a highly complex system capable of unique cognitive abilities beyond those of other mammals. Although gene expression across the developing brain has been described at single-cell resolution, similar atlases of chromatin accessibility have been primarily focused on the regulatory landscape of the developing human forebrain in the second-trimester of pregnancy. A collaboration between Marijn Schipper and Danielle Posthuma from CNCR-CTG and Camiel Mannens and Sten Linnarsson from the Karolinska Institute Sweden has opened a new window in creating the first map of chromatin accessibility and paired gene expression in the entire embryonic human brain in the first three months of development. The study is published May 1, 2024 in Nature.
On 12 December 2023 the Annual Amsterdam Neuroscience meeting took place at the RAI Amsterdam. In the afternoon a special session was dedicated to “Consortia at work”. Different “duos” involved in large consortia explained the strength and added value of these collaborative initiatives. In this first part we highlight the talk by Prof. dr. Huib Mansvelder and Prof. dr. Boudewijn Lelieveldt, two of the lead-PIs of BRAINSCAPES, who shared their experiences and involvement in the prestigious US Brain Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN). This large-scale effort sees eleven different groups (and techniques) combined to develop cell atlases of the primate brain. In the past years BICAN’s predecessor has yielded its first important successes, and achieved things that no other single lab could do at this scale. Besides this, consortia help to extend networks and (importantly) are also just great fun!
Single-cell RNA-sequencing is increasingly used to map the cellular heterogeneity of complex tissues. For example, more than 300 studies profiled a total of over 44 million cells across different brain regions, ages, and species. Since different research groups usually specialize in different cell-type compartments, these datasets usually differ in terminology and annotation depth. Our understanding of cellular diversity can be greatly enhanced by integrating these datasets to obtain a comprehensive atlas. In a recent publication, Lieke Michielsen, Marcel Reinders and Ahmed Mahfouz, in collaboration with the group of Fabian Theis (Helmholtz Centrum München), present ‘treeArches’, a framework to automatically build and update such reference atlases with a corresponding cell-type hierarchy. The atlas can be used to transfer cell annotations to new unlabeled datasets, facilitating reproducible analysis.
