Blog | Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Celebrating another chapter of sustainability at SWC

Following on from 2021 and 2022, SWC has received a third Gold award as part of the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF). We look back on our sustainability efforts, big and small, over the years and look ahead to more initiatives to come.

Cross-area coupling and consolidation during sleep

How do brain areas talk to each other during sleep to enable us to wake up one morning and realise we’ve gotten better at a new motor skill like biking or skiing? In a SWC Seminar, Dr Karunesh Ganguly discussed his work uncovering a dialogue between cortical and subcortical areas leading to memory consolidation during skill learning.

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Deciphering the brain’s prediction machine

How does the brain act as a prediction machine and how does it process unexpected events? Researchers at SWC have been studying sensory prediction errors using two-photon calcium imaging and optogenetics to take us a step closer to understanding both the nature of prediction error signals as well as the mechanisms by which they arise.

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Studying social behaviours at a cellular level

Social interactions are challenging to study, particularly at a cellular level. In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Ziv Williams explained how he is overcoming these challenges using naturalistic approaches. In this Q&A, he shares his most interesting findings to date and his drive to build a comprehensive map of how neurons in the brain encode language.

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Untangling the neural bases of prosocial behaviour

How do you go about studying the neural basis of empathy and prosociality and what techniques are needed to understand interbrain dynamics at the cellular level? Dr Weizhe Hong recently gave a SWC Seminar to discuss his group’s work uncovering the neural mechanisms of prosocial behaviour.

Learning from models of suboptimal learning

Modelling a complex behaviour like learning can leave out some aspects of the data. Professor Peter Dayan recently gave a seminar at SWC where he shared his work on modelling the behaviour of subjects in a couple of well-established experimental tasks. In this Q&A, he goes into more detail about the models he uses and the role each one plays.

Motivated mice matter: Refining fluid control

How can fluid control be made better for both animals and the science? The SWC/Gatsby 3Rs Group teamed up with the NC3Rs to run a half-day workshop at SWC, bringing together experienced researchers and experts from across the UK.

Crossing boundaries: from the blood-brain barrier to the disciplines of science

When Viktor Plattner first met visiting scholar Viviana Gradinaru at SWC they spoke about an exciting new blood-brain barrier (BBB) crossing virus in development in her lab at Caltech. Viktor was eager to try out the new adeno-associated virus (AAV) in his neuroscience research in rats. He shared the resulting confocal images with Viviana’s team, which were published in a Nature Communications paper. This initial collaboration led to a pioneering new direction for his research project in the Akrami lab at SWC.

Exploring the four realms of existence

In a recent SWC seminar, Professor Joseph LeDoux proposed a new framework for characterising our existence, made up of four different realms – biological, neurobiological, cognitive and conscious. In this Q&A, he explains how the four realms relate to each other and the implications for neuroscience and the higher-order theory of consciousness.

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Public Engagement

SWC scientists inspire ripples of curiosity at local school

Following our visits in 2019 and 2022, SWC volunteers went along to Greenford in West London earlier this month for another day filled with science and activities in celebration of the William Perkin CofE High School Founder’s Day.

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Multisensory learning: insights from fruit flies

How does the brain integrate sensory information from different modalities during learning and in what way does this relate to memory performance? In this Q&A, SWC Emerging Neuroscientist Seminar Series (ENSS) speaker Dr Zeynep Okray and her research colleague Dr Pedro Jacob, explain their research in fruit flies to tackle these big research questions.

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Memory linking in dendritic branches

In the third Emerging Neuroscientists Seminar Series (ENSS) talk of 2022/23, Dr Megha Sehgal shared her work exploring dendritic mechanisms of memory linking over time. In this Q&A, she encourages future ENSS applicants and explains how her work furthers the understanding of learning and memory at the sub-neuronal level.