Susana Q. Lima is a Portuguese neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. [1] Her research studies neural mechanisms of sexual behavior and mate choice.
Susana Q. Lima is a Portuguese neuroscientist and principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. [1] Her research studies neural mechanisms of sexual behavior and mate choice.
Susana Lima was born in the Azores Islands, and moved to Northern Portugal when she was young. She attended middle and high school near Porto, Portugal. During her last six months of university in Portugal, Lima participated in a project abroad in Amsterdam where she studied the effect of heat shock in yeast.
In 2005, Lima obtained her Ph.D. from the doctoral program in Biology and Medicine at the Gulbenkian Institute for Science. During this time, she was able to study abroad in New York at Memorial Sloan Kettering as well as Yale University under the supervision of Gero Miesenböck. Following her Ph.D, Lima completed her postdoctoral research with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under neuroscientist Anthony Zador. [2]
Lima completed her Ph.D. at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York working in Gero Miesenböck’s lab. She spent five years researching and developing optogenetics, a research technique that uses light to activate a single neuron in order to study the processes activated by the neuron. Her findings, published in Cell in 2005, were the first reported use of optogenetics. [2] Lima introduced P2X2 receptors, activated by ATP, into flies in order to activate specific neurons using a photosensitive form of ATP. In this way, she was able to activate a specific neuronal path that controls the mechanism by which flies jump and fly by shining a light on transgenic flies. [3]
During her postdoctoral training in Anthony Zador’s lab, Lima used optogenetic tools to develop a new method to identify neuronal subtypes in vivo on the rodent auditory cortex. This technique was called optotagging. After her accomplishments at Cold Spring Harbor, she returned to Portugal in 2008 and became part of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program.
Some of her most recent research involves investigating how the brain controls sexual behavior through electrophysiology, optogenetics, anatomy and behavioral studies. Her publications include studies on prolactin’s involvement in the post-ejaculatory refractory period, [4] how the ventromedial hypothalamus of the brain serves to control mating behavior, [5] how sexual imprinting overrides order effects during sampling of prospective mates, [6] and the neural circuits for reproduction. [7] Her lab's long term goal is to test the hypothesis that mate choice has an impact on the regulation of sexual behavior.
Soon after their marriage, Lima and her husband, Zachary Mainen, returned to Portugal to help start the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program. [2]
The hypothalamus is a small part of the vertebrate brain that contains a number of nuclei with a variety of functions. One of the most important functions is to link the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland. The hypothalamus is located below the thalamus and is part of the limbic system. It forms the ventral part of the diencephalon. All vertebrate brains contain a hypothalamus. In humans, it is about the size of an almond.
The nucleus accumbens is a region in the basal forebrain rostral to the preoptic area of the hypothalamus. The nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle collectively form the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum and dorsal striatum collectively form the striatum, which is the main component of the basal ganglia. The dopaminergic neurons of the mesolimbic pathway project onto the GABAergic medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens and olfactory tubercle. Each cerebral hemisphere has its own nucleus accumbens, which can be divided into two structures: the nucleus accumbens core and the nucleus accumbens shell. These substructures have different morphology and functions.
Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals.
The arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus (ARH), or ARC, is also known as the infundibular nucleus to distinguish it from the arcuate nucleus of the medulla oblongata in the brainstem. The arcuate nucleus is an aggregation of neurons in the mediobasal hypothalamus, adjacent to the third ventricle and the median eminence. The arcuate nucleus includes several important and diverse populations of neurons that help mediate different neuroendocrine and physiological functions, including neuroendocrine neurons, centrally projecting neurons, and astrocytes. The populations of neurons found in the arcuate nucleus are based on the hormones they secrete or interact with and are responsible for hypothalamic function, such as regulating hormones released from the pituitary gland or secreting their own hormones. Neurons in this region are also responsible for integrating information and providing inputs to other nuclei in the hypothalamus or inputs to areas outside this region of the brain. These neurons, generated from the ventral part of the periventricular epithelium during embryonic development, locate dorsally in the hypothalamus, becoming part of the ventromedial hypothalamic region. The function of the arcuate nucleus relies on its diversity of neurons, but its central role is involved in homeostasis. The arcuate nucleus provides many physiological roles involved in feeding, metabolism, fertility, and cardiovascular regulation.
Lordosis behavior, also known as mammalian lordosis or presenting, is the naturally occurring body posture for sexual receptivity to copulation present in females of most mammals including rodents, elephants, cats, and humans. The primary characteristics of the behavior are a lowering of the forelimbs but with the rear limbs extended and hips raised, ventral arching of the spine and a raising, or sideward displacement, of the tail. During lordosis, the spine curves dorsoventrally so that its apex points towards the abdomen.
Vasoactive intestinal peptide, also known as vasoactive intestinal polypeptide or VIP, is a peptide hormone that is vasoactive in the intestine. VIP is a peptide of 28 amino acid residues that belongs to a glucagon/secretin superfamily, the ligand of class II G protein–coupled receptors. VIP is produced in many tissues of vertebrates including the gut, pancreas, cortex, and suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus in the brain. VIP stimulates contractility in the heart, causes vasodilation, increases glycogenolysis, lowers arterial blood pressure and relaxes the smooth muscle of trachea, stomach and gallbladder. In humans, the vasoactive intestinal peptide is encoded by the VIP gene.
Channelrhodopsins are a subfamily of retinylidene proteins (rhodopsins) that function as light-gated ion channels. They serve as sensory photoreceptors in unicellular green algae, controlling phototaxis: movement in response to light. Expressed in cells of other organisms, they enable light to control electrical excitability, intracellular acidity, calcium influx, and other cellular processes. Channelrhodopsin-1 (ChR1) and Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) from the model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are the first discovered channelrhodopsins. Variants that are sensitive to different colors of light or selective for specific ions have been cloned from other species of algae and protists.
The stria terminalis is a structure in the brain consisting of a band of fibers running along the lateral margin of the ventricular surface of the thalamus. Serving as a major output pathway of the amygdala, the stria terminalis runs from its centromedial division to the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus.
Gero Andreas Miesenböck is an Austrian scientist. He is currently Waynflete Professor of Physiology and Director of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB) at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Optogenetics is a biological technique to control the activity of neurons or other cell types with light. This is achieved by expression of light-sensitive ion channels, pumps or enzymes specifically in the target cells. On the level of individual cells, light-activated enzymes and transcription factors allow precise control of biochemical signaling pathways. In systems neuroscience, the ability to control the activity of a genetically defined set of neurons has been used to understand their contribution to decision making, learning, fear memory, mating, addiction, feeding, and locomotion. In a first medical application of optogenetic technology, vision was partially restored in a blind patient with Retinitis pigmentosa.
Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist and entrepreneur at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, and a full member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics and expansion microscopy. Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2007, and continues to develop new optogenetic tools as well as other technologies for the manipulation and analysis of brain structure and activity. He received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Karl Alexander Deisseroth is an American scientist. He is the D.H. Chen Foundation Professor of Bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.
Yang Dan is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. She is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. She is a past recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, and Society for Neuroscience Research Awards for Innovation in Neuroscience. Recognized for her research on the neural circuits that control behavior, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Georg Nagel is a biophysicist and professor at the Department for Neurophysiology at the University of Würzburg in Germany. His research is focused on microbial photoreceptors and the development of optogenetic tools.
Megan Carey is a neuroscientist and Group Leader of the Neural Circuits and Behavior Laboratory at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. She is known for her work on how the cerebellum controls coordinated movement.
Lisa Gunaydin is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco. Gunaydin helped discover optogenetics in the lab of Karl Deisseroth and now uses this technique in combination with neural and behavioral recordings to probe the neural circuits underlying emotional behaviors.
Ream Al-Hasani is a British neuroscientist and pharmacologist as well as an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Al-Hasani studies the endogenous opioid system to understand how to target it therapeutically to treat addiction, affective disorders, and chronic pain.
Gloria Choi is an American neuroscientist and neuroimmunologist and the Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Professor in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Choi is known for elucidating the role of the immune system in the development of autism spectrum disorder-like phenotypes. Her lab currently explores how sensory experiences drive internal states and behavioural outcomes through probing the olfactory system as well as the neuroimmune system.
Jessica Cardin is an American neuroscientist who is an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. Cardin's lab studies local circuits within the primary visual cortex to understand how cellular and synaptic interactions flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts to give rise to visual perceptions and drive motivated behaviors. Cardin's lab applies their knowledge of adaptive cortical circuit regulation to probe how circuit dysfunction manifests in disease models.
Dayu Lin is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Physiology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. Lin discovered the neural circuits in the hypothalamus that give rise to aggression in mice. Her lab at NYU now probes the neural circuits underlying innate social behaviors, with a focus on aggressive and defensive behaviors.
