Ana Margarida Nunes

Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia | CIUHCT-UL/UNL · History of Cartography

Coffee intake is increasingly recognized as a life-style factor associated with the preservation of health, but there is still a debate on the relative effects of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee. We now tested how the regular drinking of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee for 3 weeks impacted on the behavior of male and female adult mice. Ma...

Depressive conditions precipitated by repeated stress are a major socio-economical burden in Western countries. Previous studies showed that ATP-P2X7 receptors (P2X7R) and adenosine A2A receptors (A2AR) antagonists attenuate behavioral modifications upon exposure to repeated stress. Since it is unknown if these two purinergic modulation systems wor...

The consumption of caffeine modulates working and reference memory through the antagonism of adenosine A2A receptors (A2AR) controlling synaptic plasticity processes in hippocampal excitatory synapses. Fear memory essentially involves plastic changes in amygdala circuits. However, it is unknown if A2AR in the amygdala regulate synaptic plasticity a...

Significance Epidemiological studies show that individuals exposed to repeated stress, a major trigger of depression, increase their caffeine intake, which correlates inversely with the incidence of depression. However, the mechanism underlying this protective effect is unknown. We used an animal model of chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) to show...

We previously reported a G>C point mutation located at position -48 within the calreticulin gene core promoter in one individual suffering from paranoid schizophrenia that has also been diagnosed with affective disorder. However, a putative bona fide functional link between this mutation in the calreticulin gene and schizoaffective disorder has rem...

Presenilin-1 (PS1) is a component of the beta-catenin degradation machinery, and PS1 mutations linked to familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD) represent a loss of this function, leading, in non-neuronal cells, to accumulation of cyclin D1, aberrant cell cycle activation and hyperproliferation. In post-mitotic neurons, cell cycle activation is thought...