Carne asada (y vegetales) del laboratorio

Very happy to host Dr. Flavia Venetucci from @sickkidsto.bsky.social last month and to the start of a great collaboration.

Can't ask for a better team #ISAR2025

Registrations are open for the 2nd International Symposium on Addiction Research (ISAR) 2025 in Querétaro, Mexico, from August 25-27. Come visit us and show your work! addictions.inb.unam.mx

We found a more strongly connected network in recurrent MDD when combining symptoms and brain characteristics. We also found that insomnia and somatic symptoms seem to be central to recurrent MDD, suggesting these symptoms could serve as possible clinical targets.

He used the REST MDD Dataset from Chaogan Yan and colleagues in China, and a multimodal network analysis:

People from my lab did a wonderful job on Brain Week teaching about the problems with substance use. A major effort on their part.

We also found higher microglia count and region-specific phenotypes. More info in the preprint.

Using deformation-based morphometry, we found that morphine self-administration was related to volume changes in regions like cerebellum, basal ganglia and insula, among others.

For this we measured in vivo structural MRI before and after morphine self-administration using FR-1 in adolescent rats. Then, we did microscopy analysis of microglia cell count and phenotype using immunofluorescence.

We found that chronic stress did not increase ethanol drinking. We also found that chronic stress and ethanol intake distinctly and in combination affected several networks in development, where males were more affected in brain structure and females in functional connectivity:

To answer this we used an animal model with chronic physical stress + ethanol drinking and did longitudinal ethanol intake and neuroimaging measures, as well as multivariate analysis.

Lab Posada 2024, with piñata and everything.