Anahita Hamidi

Boston University | BU · Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering

Emerging evidence indicates that distinct hippocampal domains differentially drive cognition and emotion; dorsal regions encode spatial, temporal, and contextual information, whereas ventral regions regulate stress responses, anxiety-related behaviors, and emotional states. Although previous studies demonstrate that optically manipulating cells in...

Memories formed during infancy are forgotten in adulthood, a phenomenon called 'infantile amnesia'. New research suggests that these memories can be artificially recovered in adulthood, suggesting that they were never completely lost in the first place.

The hippocampus is assumed to retrieve memory by reinstating patterns of cortical activity that were observed during learning. To test this idea, we monitored the activity of individual cortical neurons while simultaneously inactivating the hippocampus. Neurons that were active during context fear conditioning were tagged with the long-lasting fluo...

Research suggests that dysfunctional glutamatergic signalling may contribute to depression, a debilitating mood disorder affecting millions of individuals worldwide. Ketamine, a N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, exerts rapid antidepressant effects in approximately 70% of patients. Glutamate evokes the release of D-serine from astrocy...

Despite the long-established therapeutic efficacy of lithium in the treatment of bipolar disorder (BPD), its molecular mechanism of action remains elusive. Newly developed stable isotope-resolved metabolomics (SIRM) is a powerful approach that can be used to elucidate systematically how lithium impacts glial and neuronal metabolic pathways and acti...

Several intracellular signaling cascades, such as the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK), Wnt-signaling/GSK-3, PLC/PKC, and PI3K pathways, have been shown to be affected directly or indirectly by mood stabilizers. Clinical imaging studies reveal that mood disorders are associated with structural and/or metabolic changes in specific brain r...