Our new paper is out!!!

Our finding shows that sex, gonadal hormones, and the hormone replacement therapy Tibolone appears to interact in mitochondrial metabolism and neurodegeneration pathways - with possible implications for study design and intervention. Find it here: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/23/14754

Congratulations Andrew, well done! 

Some exciting news!

Andrew had been selected and recently attended the 4^th ISN-JNC Flagship School: “Brain Metabolism in Health and Disease”  in Schmerlenbach, Germany. This was a great event with the participation of speakers well known in the metabolism field! 

Andrew is now in Madrid (Spain) for an internship funded by IBRO to run some experiments in the lab of Dr Angeles Arevalo at the Cajal Institute. Great results coming up...

Our lab has a new Postdoctoral fellow!  Abdoh Taleb finished his doctoral studies in China and moved to Ireland to start his Postdoctoral position in Neuroscience funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Warm welcome from our team, Abdoh, and we do really hope you enjoy UL and Ireland! 

Summer is here, this means new students are joining our lab to work on mitochondria-related projects. As a recipient of a Roibeárd Thornton Memorial- Janssen (companies of Johnson and Johnson) fellowship, Emma Noonan, now a 3rd year Bioscience student, will develop her skills in oxidative phosphorylation in cells under metabolic dysfunction.  

Two ERASMUS students also join our team. Both from Spain, Rosa and Enrique will work on a project to investigate how tibolone regulates lipid metabolism in in vitro cells. 

Welcome Emma, Rosa and Enrique. We hope you enjoy working with us over the summer. 

Our PhD student Andrew has been awarded an Exchange fellowship from International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) for an internship in the laboratory of Dr Arevalo at Cajal Institute, Madrid, Spain. Part of his PhD project will be carried out there using the Four Core genotype mice to assess sex differences in mitochondria! Well done and congrats Andrew!

Our lab is delighted to have been awarded under the Frontiers for the Future Programme. Our grant will focus on neuroglobin, traumatic brain injury and tibolone and investigate how/why sex matters in mitochondria response to injury.

This is an international collaborative project with Dr David Ramírez (@davidmau @theramirezlab ) at Universidad de Concepción (Chile) to explore drugs that protect mitochondria in a sex-dependent manner following TBI. 

We sincerely thank Science Foundation Ireland for this great support and for the evaluators/reviewers for taking the time and effort and for appreciating our proposal. New exciting research is coming up!!!

A new original paper from our group is out! This international collaborative paper with Janneth Gonzalez & team at PUJ (Colombia) and David Ramírez at Universidad de Concepción (Chile) reports prohibitin as a key mitochondrial protein being regulated by dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a metabolite of testosterone, and significantly involved in traumatic brain injury pathology. TBI patients suffer from hypogonadism, so treatment with DHT, a metabolite of testosterone, might be a promising therapeutic approach! #TBI #DHT #testosterone #prohibitin

Two new papers in collaboration with Janneth Gonzalez & team are now out!!! In the review by Vesga-Jiménez et al we deeply discussed the implications of fatty acids, in particular palmitic acid, an unsaturated lipid, in the pathological mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases. In the second paper by Cabezas et al, we used machine learning and multivariate statistical analysis to integrate lipidomics and metabolomics of human astrocytes exposed to high concentration of palmitic acid and delved into how tibolone protects these cells under lipotoxicity. 

Our lab is delighted to welcome Alannah Aherne, our new Research Assistant! She will be working on a project to explore protection by neuroglobin in traumatic brain injury. We are very excited to have you in our team!!! Welcome, Alannah! 

Our lab participated in the 11th International Meeting on Steroids and Nervous System (virtual) from 19-22 February. Our PhD student Andrew McGovern made an outstanding oral presentation titled "Sex differences in mitochondrial metabolism from a proteomic analysis of a gonadectomised and tibolone treated mouse model". Well done Andrew!!!!