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We are now inviting researchers to submit abstracts for the first talk of the EndoGlia Seminar Series, hosted by the Barreto Lab at the University of Limerick.
EndoGlia was created to bring together researchers working across endocrinology, glial biology, brain ageing, neurodegeneration, and related fields. As we launch this new series, we are looking for a speaker to open the conversation and deliver the very first EndoGlia seminar.
🌐 This seminar series will be fully online, making it accessible to researchers regardless of their location.
📅 Abstract submissions are open until 30 September 2026.
The first seminar is planned for mid-to-late October, and further details will be announced as soon as the speaker and date are confirmed.
Interested in being our first speaker?
📩 Send your abstract to info@barretolab.org
We are excited to begin building the EndoGlia community and we would love for you to be part of its very first seminar.
#EndoGlia #Neuroscience #Glia #Endocrinology #BrainAgeing #Neurodegeneration #AcademicSeminars #ResearchCommunity
Congratulations to Sarah Buckley, who completed her master's thesis in our lab!!!
Her work asked an important question. We know that women are affected by Alzheimer's disease more than men, but we still do not fully understand why. Sarah looked at one part of this puzzle, the idea of brain resilience, which is the brain's ability to keep working even when disease is present.
🧩 Alzheimer's is very hard to understand because it is rarely about one single gene going wrong. Using human datasets from the hippocampus, she looked at how genes behave in women and men with the disease. Then studied how those genes work together, not one by one, but as a group.
💡 This is where it gets interesting. Sarah found that the disease does not look the same in women and men at the molecular level. In the female brain, the defences were organised into connected systems working together, across neuronal flexibility, energy and fat balance, blood supply to the brain, and cell structure. In the male brain, that same level of organisation did not appear in the same way. This may reflect a resilient response in some women, and while it does not yet tell us why women are more affected, it shows that any answer will need to take sex differences seriously.
👏 Congratulations, Sarah. This is really good work, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.
#Alzheimers #WomensBrainHealth #Neuroscience #BrainHealth #SexDifferences #Research
🎓 A proud supervisor! Congratulations to Manuela Faddetta, who defended and completed her master's thesis in our lab.
Her MSc work titled "Mitochondrial proteomic remodelling across healthy ageing and Alzheimer's disease in the mouse hippocampus" tackled a question that sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to answer. When mitochondria change in Alzheimer's disease, is this just an acceleration of normal ageing, or something completely different?
Manuela took a wider view. She built a computational framework that treats the mitochondria of the hippocampus as a whole system, and then asked how that system reorganises across the lifespan and how it departs from healthy ageing in disease.
This work sits right at the heart of what our lab cares about, how sex, mitochondria and ageing come together to shape brain health, and it may have real implications for how mitochondrial changes are one day diagnosed and treated.
Stay tuned for these results, paper is coming out soon!
🔬 Well done, Manuela!!!
Our lab studies how hormones and metabolism shape the brain as we age, and why these changes can lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. A large part of this work is about making sense of complex biological data.
That is where you come in.
We are looking to host a student through Erasmus programme with an interest or some experience in big data and machine learning, who would like to apply these skills to a real biological question. You would help us explore the metabolic and neuroendocrine changes that happen with ageing and disease, working with rich datasets that span from molecules to human data.
You do not need to have done all of this before. What matters most is curiosity, a willingness to learn, and an interest in using data to understand the brain.
You would join a friendly and international team, working at the meeting point of biology, data science and brain health, on questions that really matter for people's lives.
🧠 If this sounds like you, or someone you know, we would be glad to hear from you. Please email George.Barreto@ul.ie.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is often discussed through its classical hallmarks: amyloid-β and tau. Yet long before extensive neurodegeneration, the brain already shows profound changes in how it uses and manages energy.
Brain hypometabolism is one of the earliest functional alterations observed in AD, with reduced glucose utilisation detectable during prodromal stages. Alongside this, mitochondrial dysfunction, altered bioenergetics and increased oxidative stress suggest that the problem extends beyond glucose availability alone.
The emerging picture is therefore more complex than simply a brain that is “running out of energy.”
Increasing evidence points towards metabolic inflexibility: a reduced ability of brain cells to adapt energy production and substrate utilisation to changing demands and cellular stress.
And this is why studying metabolism in AD matters.
If metabolic dysfunction emerges before substantial pathology, it could provide a window into the early biology of disease, helping us understand when metabolic adaptation becomes failure, why some cells become vulnerable, and whether this process can still be modified.
🔬 The challenge now is to understand whether metabolic dysfunction is a driver, a consequence, or part of a dynamic feedback loop in AD progression.
#AlzheimersDisease #Neuroscience #BrainMetabolism #Mitochondria #Neurodegeneration #MetabolicHealth #BarretoLab
