Publications by Simone Astori | EPFL Graph Search

Corticotropin-releasing hormone modulates NREM sleep consolidation through the thalamic reticular nucleus

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori

Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is a peptide associated with stress and anxiety that acts as a potent modulator throughout the nervous system. The thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) displays high expression of the CRH receptor 1 (CRHR1), but whether CR ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Urolithin A abolishes high anxiety and rescues the associated mitochondria-related transcriptomic signatures and synaptic function

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Dogukan Hazar Ülgen, Davide D'Amico, Simone Astori

Background: Chronic anxiety is common, disabling, and often refractory to current therapies. Mounting evidence implicates mitochondrial abnormalities in anxiety-related phenotypes. Urolithin A (UA), a gut microbiota-derived metabolite known to enhance mito ...

Elsevier BV2025

The brain’s go-getter circuit: Anterior cingulate cortex to nucleus accumbens and its disruption by stress

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Simone Astori

2024

Chromatin plasticity predetermines neuronal eligibility for memory trace formation

Liliane Glauser, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Marion Leleu, Johannes Gräff, Simone Astori, Giulia Santoni

Memories are encoded by sparse populations of neurons but how such sparsity arises remains largely unknown. We found that a neuron’s eligibility to be recruited into the memory trace depends on its epigenetic state prior to encoding. Principal neurons in t ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2024

Mitofusin-2 in nucleus accumbens D2-MSNs regulates social dominance and neuronal function

Bernard Schneider, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Elias Georges Gebara, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Simone Astori, Sriparna Ghosal, Eva Ramos Fernandez, Alessandro Chioino

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a brain hub regulating motivated behaviors, including social competitiveness. Mitochondrial function in the NAc links anxiety with social competitiveness, and the mitochondrial fusion protein mitofusin 2 (Mfn2) in NAc neurons ...

2023

Blunted Glucocorticoid Responsiveness to Stress Causes Behavioral and Biological Alterations That Lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Vulnerability

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Sophie Elizabeth Walker, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Simone Astori, Silvia Monari

Background: Understanding why only a subset of trauma-exposed individuals develop posttraumatic stress disorder is critical for advancing clinical strategies. A few behavioral (deficits in fear extinction) and biological (blunted glucocorticoid levels, sma ...

2023

Glutathione in the nucleus accumbens regulates motivation to exert reward-incentivized effort

Pascal Steiner, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Lijing Xin, Olivia Zanoletti, Fiona Hollis, Alina Veronika Irene Strasser, Ioannis Zalachoras, Simone Astori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Eva Ramos Fernandez

Emerging evidence is implicating mitochondrial function and metabolism in the nucleus accumbens in motivated performance. However, the brain is vulnerable to excessive oxidative insults resulting from neurometabolic processes, and whether antioxidant level ...

2022

Paradoxical neuronal hyperexcitability in a mouse model of mitochondrial pyruvate import deficiency

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Simone Astori, Eva Ramos Fernandez

Neuronal excitation imposes a high demand of ATP in neurons. Most of the ATP derives primarily from pyruvate-mediated oxidative phosphorylation, a process that relies on import of pyruvate into mitochondria occuring exclusively via the mitochondrial pyruva ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2022

Opposite effects of stress on effortful motivation in high and low anxiety are mediated by CRHR1 in the VTA

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Ioannis Zalachoras, Simone Astori, Mandy Meijer

Individuals frequently differ in their behavioral and cognitive responses to stress. However, whether motivation is differently affected by acute stress in different individuals remains to be established. By exploiting natural variation in trait anxiety in ...

2022

eNAMPT actions through nucleus accumbens NAD + /SIRT1 link increased adiposity with sociability deficits programmed by peripuberty stress

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Johan Auwerx, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Wei Huang, Laia Morato Fornaguera, Ioannis Zalachoras, Simone Astori, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Sriparna Ghosal, Lei Cao

Obesity is frequently associated with impairments in the social domain, and stress at puberty can lead to long-lasting changes in visceral fat deposition and in social behaviors. However, whether stress-induced changes in adipose tissue can affect fat-to-b ...

2022

A thalamo-amygdalar circuit underlying the extinction of remote fear memories

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Johannes Gräff, Bianca Ambrogina Silva, Simone Astori, Allison Marie Burns, Giulia Santoni

Silva et al. reveal distinct circuits for the extinction of remote fear memories, with the thalamic nucleus reuniens and its outputs to the basolateral amygdala taking center stage. Fear and trauma generate some of the longest-lived memories. Despite the c ...

2021

Constitutive differences in glucocorticoid responsiveness are related to divergent spatial information processing abilities

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Eleni Vasilaki, Damien Sébastien Huzard, Simone Astori

The stress response facilitates survival through adaptation and is intimately related to cognitive processes. The Morris water maze task probes spatial learning and memory in rodents and glucocorticoids (i.e. corticosterone (CORT) in rats) have been sugges ...

2020

Latency to Reward Predicts Social Dominance in Rats: A Causal Role for the Dopaminergic Mesolimbic System

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Laura Lozano Montes, Ioannis Zalachoras, Sonia Abad Florensa, Simone Astori

Reward signals encoded in the mesolimbic dopaminergic system guide approach/seeking behaviors to all varieties of life-supporting stimuli (rewards). Differences in dopamine (DA) levels have been found between dominant and submissive animals. However, it is ...

2019

Amygdala GluN2B-NMDAR dysfunction is critical in abnormal aggression of neurodevelopmental origin induced by St8sia2 deficiency

Graham Knott, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Elias Georges Gebara, Wei Tang, Alexandre Claude Gustave Bacq, Johannes Gräff, Catherine Maclachlan, Jose Vicente Sanchez Mut, Bianca Ambrogina Silva, Simone Astori

Aggression is frequently observed in neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder. Due to a lack of understanding of its underlying mechanisms, effective treatments for abnormal aggression are still missing. ...

2020

Cortical afferents onto the nucleus Reticularis thalami promote plasticity of low-threshold excitability through GluN2C-NMDARs

Gil Vantomme, Simone Astori

Thalamus and cortex represent a highly integrated processing unit that elaborates sensory representations. Interposed between cortex and thalamus, the nucleus Reticularis thalami (nRt) receives strong cortical glutamatergic input and mediates top-down inhi ...

Nature Research2017