Neuroscientist Karine Fénelon, assistant professor of biology, has been chosen to receive the Armstrong Fund for Science at UMass Amherst’s 2022 award. The two-year, $39,121 grant will support her research project entitled “Using a Ca2+-dependent optical switch to label and manipulate brain cells linked to a behavior.”
The research aims to use an “innovative neuroscience tool” known as Cal-Light, which combines a calcium indicator with optogenetic manipulations to capture with very high precision which neurons are active at a precise moment during a particular behavior. Ultimately, this research could lead to better medical therapies for people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.
Fénelon says she was “speechless” when she learned she had won the Armstrong Fund for Science award. “I’m humbled by this award,” she says. “I put all my heart and energy into the application, and I’m very grateful for this opportunity to hopefully advance knowledge and help patients worldwide.”
In 2006, benefactors John and Elizabeth Armstrong established their Fund for Science to identify and support promising research that doesn’t have enough data available for the investigators to apply for standard funding.
People with schizophrenia and various neurodegenerative disorders have attention impairments that neuroscientists can assess by measuring prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle reflex. PPI occurs when a weak stimulus is presented before a startle stimulus, which inhibits the startle response.
“However, the neurotransmitter systems and synaptic pathways underlying PPI are still unresolved, even under non-pathological conditions,” Fénelon wrote in her grant application. “Such knowledge is needed to target deep brain stimulation, focus ultrasound and neurotransmitter-specific therapeutic approaches in the majority of patients who are unresponsive to current antipsychotics and other pharmaceuticals.”
Fénelon will build on her recent research, published in BMC Biology, that showed for the first time how the amygdala, a brain region typically associated with fear, contributes to PPI by activating small inhibitory neurons in the mouse brain stem.
In her lab in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, supported by the Armstrong Fund grant, Fénelon will expand her team’s research program toward “labelling and photo-manipulating neuronal circuits directly tied to various cognitive and behavioral processes affected by disease states. In follow-up experiments, we will use Cal-Light to design therapeutic strategies and reverse disease phenotypes, by targeting specific brain pathways in our schizophrenia mouse model.”