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The Exeter Brain newsletter comes out every month. Read its current edition here  to learn about upcoming events, news, opportunities and ongoing studies. 

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Latest news

Successful seed corn applications

Congratulations to the following, who submitted a successful application to the Exeter Brain Network seedcorn fund.

Joseph Sweetman: Marr's moral mind/brain

The pilot project will be part of a programme of research that will employ a formal model of moral cognition and examine it at behavioural, computational, neural, and developmental/learning levels of understanding. This programme of research is interdisciplinary drawing on computational/computer science, cognitive neuroscience and psychological approaches. This project will offer a novel opportunity to test a formal model of moral cognition and help to gain insights into how the mind/brain does moral perception.

 Clémence Bernard: Investigating the developmental expression of a chromatin remodelling factor in VIP interneurons

This pilot project will allow us to gather preliminary data on the expression and enrichment of Chd7 in developing mouse cortical VIP interneurons, as well as on VIP interneuron numbers in a mouse model of CHARGE syndrome. Future projects will aim to (1)identify the function of Chd7 in VIP interneurons development, (2) determine the role ofChd7 in establishing VIP connectivity and (3) investigate the epigenetic mechanisms underlying Chd7 functions in VIP interneurons.

Jan Vollert: Pain as a predictor of dementia: harnessing the PROTECT study

We will harvest the PROTECT database to retrospectively analyse the link between chronic pain and dementia. We will first publish a paper on current levels of pain in the PROTECT cohort; a large cohort of mostly healthy and diverse individuals. The core group includes pain researchers, data scientists, and a pain clinician. Future projects will involve deeply phenotyping a subgroup of the cohort, using mechanistic pain studies, pain interference, reduction of quality of life, qualitative interviews, proteomic and genomic analyses, to holistically understand pain mechanisms in these patients.