“A complete joke”
After the starting gun fires, Australian researchers have to wait 2–3 years before even starting the race.
Really clear article explaining the impossibly long new time-frames for Australian Research Council grants.
By @liammannix.bsky.social
New in #JNeurosci: Rat study from van Mourik et al. suggests that the anterior insula may be involved in biasing decision-making processes to favor alcohol over social rewards. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1180-25.2026
Nice work Nathan and team!
🚨📃New Wassum Lab Paper 📃🚨
Out today, Melissa Malvaez, Nick Griffin, Andrea Suarez & team discovered that dopamine can enable reward predictions to shape how we pursue reward.
Surprisingly, we find that dopamine can constrain instrumental reward seeking.
www.jneurosci.org/content/46/8...
🧵👇🏻
As promised at the #GRC Basal Ganglia, here is our recent review on striatal cholinergic heterogeneity. I hope people find it useful and inspiring.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/cel...
Thanks Shauna! I'm loving your recent work too. Really interesting xo
Discovery Projects are now a complete joke:
EoIs were due 12 Dec last year. Full apps are due 22 April this year. Results won't be out until next year: 15 Jan – 15 Apr 2027.
That’s up to 16 MONTHS!
Ha ha I know right. I was super stoked that they had an open access option, and even more stoked when my university paid for it ;)
Our back-translation of value-modulated attentional capture to rats and mice is now published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, and it's open access! Yay.
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
Nice work Phil and team!
New paper from lab on how VTA dopamine neurons + GABA inhibition contribute to punishment learning.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Astrocytes are where it is at!
Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue
New preprint from the lab looking at the role of astrocytes in the nucleus accumbens core in incentive value-driven actions:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Happy 2026 everyone!
Here's a nice write up of our recent work published in Neuropsychopharmacology, on the balance of habits and goal-directed actions in compulsive disorders:
lnkd.in/g84fYnD5
So well deserved! Congratulations. Can't wait to celebrate with you today xo
I wish I was as busy as I was the first time I felt like I was busy.
Got an invitation to provide an article for a journal called "Nature, Cell, and Science" and was wondering if it was predatory. Google gave me this reddit thread, funny:
www.reddit.com/r/labrats/co...
First alcohol lab paper out today! Neurotoxic effects of chronic ethanol on cholinergic interneurons in the dorsomedial striatum.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
Many thanks to all contributors!
P.P.S. As far as treatments go, my prediction would be that varenicline would be most effective in treatment individuals with neuroinflammation in the dorsal striatum in particular, based on prior work showing that acetylcholine in the dorsal striatum is necessary for cognitive flexibility
We have recently back-translated a task from humans to rats and mice (called value modulated attentional capture) that is associated with transdiagnostic compulsivity, and we are finding really interesting effects of neuroinflammation in dorsal/ventral striatum on that too. Stay tuned!
environmental circumstances (e.g. sometimes it is underscored by enhanced cognitive control, other times it results from increased sensitivity to cues). This is interesting as it shows that compulsivity is complex and multi-faceted, which could be why treatments work for some and not others. 4/4
such that these individuals might have distinct cognitive processes underlying their compulsivity. Second, for those with neuroinflammation in both regions it could mean that the source of their compulsivity is multi-factorial and changes depending on the 3/4
goal-directed control, whereas in the ventral striatum, neuroinflammation caused excessive sensitivity to cues. This is interesting for a couple of reasons, first because different individuals have different distributions of neuroinflammation in their striatum 2/4
Probably the thing that is most exciting to me is the finding that, even within the striatum, there is heterogeneity in the behavioural consequences of neuroinflammation in different regions. That is, neuroinflammation in the dorsal striatum caused excessive 1/4
Thank you! I would love to think so. Anti-inflammatories, cholinergic agonists (e.g. champix/varenicline) with anti-inflammatory properties are two of the ideas we are going to try in the lab. Also interested in exercise, sleep, and behavioural training, and interactions between all of the above
rdcu.be/eIyQB
Now published in Neuropsychopharmacology, here we mimicked the striatal neuroinflammation seen in the brains of individuals with compulsive disorders and found that this facilitated goal-directed action, whereas activating the Gi pathway in astrocytes prevented it
You played a critical part! And we are extremely grateful
Latest lab preprint! Astrocytes are a brain cell type vulnerable to the effects of stress and the development of psychiatric-like phenotypes in animals, yet how this translates to humans is unclear... so we dived in:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thank you for your interesting paper too!
