Eweli­na Knapska

Neu­ronal cor­re­lates of social behav­ior in health and disease

Abstract

The cur­rent impasse in devel­op­ing mech­a­nism-based ther­a­pies for neu­ropsy­chi­atric dis­or­ders can be over­come by adopt­ing a symp­tom and cir­cuit-spe­cif­ic approach. The com­plex­i­ty of neu­ronal cir­cuits involved in con­trol­ling behav­iors neces­si­tates a focused approach tar­get­ing spe­cif­ic brain regions that serve as hubs of high con­nec­tiv­i­ty. One such hub is the cen­tral amyg­dala (CeA), which plays a cru­cial role in motivation.

We iden­ti­fied spe­cif­ic neu­ronal cir­cuits with­in the CeA that are crit­i­cal for ini­ti­at­ing and main­tain­ing social inter­ac­tion, as well as rec­og­niz­ing neg­a­tive emo­tion­al states in oth­ers. We also iden­ti­fied the cir­cuits involved in mod­u­la­tion of food moti­va­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, the social- and food-relat­ed cir­cuits only par­tial­ly over­lap. Impor­tant­ly, our stud­ies have demon­strat­ed the involve­ment of the human CeA in pro­cess­ing social and food-relat­ed stimuli.

These find­ings pro­vide a promis­ing avenue for devel­op­ing ther­a­peu­tic inter­ven­tions that tar­get spe­cif­ic cir­cuits with­in the CeA. By focus­ing on the unique roles of these cir­cuits in var­i­ous behav­iors and emo­tion­al process­es, researchers can poten­tial­ly devel­op cir­cuit-focused treat­ments for moti­va­tion dis­or­ders such as depres­sion or autism spec­trum disorder.

Biog­ra­phy

Dr. Eweli­na Knap­s­ka has been a group leader at the Nenc­ki Insti­tute in War­saw since 2012. In 2013 she was pro­mot­ed to Pro­fes­sor of the Insti­tute, and since 2018 she has been vice-Pres­i­dent of the Cen­tre of Excel­lence for Neur­al Plas­tic­i­ty and Brain Dis­or­ders (BRAINCI­TY). Her research aims to under­stand the neur­al cir­cuit mech­a­nisms con­trol­ling social inter­ac­tion and emo­tion-relat­ed learn­ing. She was one of the first to describe shar­ing oth­ers’ emo­tions and their brain cor­re­lates in rodents (Knap­s­ka et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006). 

This dis­cov­ery has start­ed a new line of research on the brain mech­a­nisms under­ly­ing social­ly trans­ferred emo­tions and social learn­ing. In 2016 she was award­ed a Start­ing Grant from the Euro­pean Research Coun­cil (ERC) to study func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty of the amyg­dala in social behav­ior. With the behav­ioral pro­to­cols and c‑fos-depen­dent trac­ing of func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty of acti­vat­ed neu­rons (Knap­s­ka et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012) she devel­oped, she has shown that read­ing the emo­tions of oth­ers can pro­vide infor­ma­tion about the prox­im­i­ty of dan­ger and that dis­tinct cen­tral amyg­dala cir­cuits are recruit­ed by social­ly sig­naled immi­nent and remote dan­ger (Andra­ka, Kon­drakiewicz et al. Cur­rent Biol­o­gy, 2021). 

She has also stud­ied the role of the cen­tral amyg­dala cir­cuits in learn­ing, dis­cov­er­ing that matrix met­al­lo­pro­teinase 9 (MMP‑9)-related cir­cuits are indis­pens­able for reward learn­ing (Knap­s­ka et al., J. Neu­rosci. 2013; Pus­cian et al., Br J Phar­ma­col., 2021), in par­tic­u­lar for approach moti­va­tion (Lebitko et al., BiorX­iv preprint), which sug­gests the tar­get of selec­tive treat­ment. Accord­ing­ly, she has recent­ly shown that nor­mal­iz­ing MMP‑9 activ­i­ty in the cen­tral amyg­dala res­cues impaired reward learn­ing in the Frag­ile X syn­drome mod­el (Pus­cian et al., Mol. Psychiatry).