Congratulations to Diptendu Mukherjee for winning the first JBC SMART Brain Prize for his outstanding article: “Salient Experiences are Represented by Unique Transcriptional Signatures in the Mouse Brain”, published in eLIFE in February 2018.

Diptendu Mukherjee is presently pursuing his PhD at The Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His graduate work under the guidance of Dr. Ami Citri, focuses on transcriptional mechanisms activated during reinforcing (rewarding or aversive) experiences in mice, and how experience dependent plasticity shapes adaptive behaviors. 

Article: “Salient Experiences are Represented by Unique Transcriptional Signatures in the Mouse Brain”

Abstract:

Can we tell which event a mouse has recently experienced? This fundamental question led to an elaborate study of gene transcription across number of key brain regions, following a spectrum of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. We have learnt that each experience has a unique fingerprint in gene expression that allows decoding the recent experience with almost absolute precision. Our finding provides the first ever evidence of a neural-transcriptional code by which the brain interprets an experience and probably encodes it to memory. Potentially, this could also have implications in diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders and categorizing effect of pharmaceuticals for therapy.

 

The upcoming deadline for the next SMART Brain Prize is August 5th, 2018 

For guidlines please click here

 

 

	paper_main_text.pdf	1.57 MB
	paper_figures.pdf	5.51 MB