Lecture

The Stressed Social Brain: From Animals to Humans

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

In course

HUM-388: Personalized health: biomedical & social challenge

La médecine personnalisée, préventive, prédictive et participative bouleverse les connaissances médicales établies, ainsi que les configurations sociales et politiques de la médecine. Ce cours analyse ces processus à travers une approche interdisciplinaire ...

Description

This lecture explores the impact of stress on neuropsychopathology and the associated epigenetic mechanisms, focusing on the social brain. It delves into the physiological stress responses, glucocorticoid receptors, and the effects of peripubertal stress on behavior and aggression. The lecture also discusses the transgenerational transmission of violence induced by stress and the reversibility of stress-induced alterations through pharmacological treatment. Major forms of epigenetic modifications, including histone acetylation and methylation, are explained, along with the reprogramming of DNA methylation in mice. The implications of stress on social behavior, aggression, and mental health are highlighted, emphasizing the interplay between early life stress, genetics, and social behavior.

Instructor

Luca Chiapperino

Expertise Social Studies of Science; Science and Technology Studies; Public Health Ethics; Applied Philosophy; Sustainability Transitions Teaching & PhD Courses Health A: Innovation, Equity, Sustainability HUM-125(a) The course provides an interdisciplinary examination of key global health challenges, focusing on biomedical innovations, pharmaceuticals, sustainability, mental health, and health policies. It offer a critical skillset to engineering students approaching these complex health ch

Official source

Related concepts (31)

Social cognition

Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions. More technically, social cognition refers to how people deal with conspecifics (members of the same species) or even across species (such as pet) information, include four stages: encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing.

Histone

In biology, histones are highly basic proteins abundant in lysine and arginine residues that are found in eukaryotic cell nuclei. They act as spools around which DNA winds to create structural units called nucleosomes. Nucleosomes in turn are wrapped into 30-nanometer fibers that form tightly packed chromatin. Histones prevent DNA from becoming tangled and protect it from DNA damage. In addition, histones play important roles in gene regulation and DNA replication. Without histones, unwound DNA in chromosomes would be very long.

Brain

A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. In a human, the cerebral cortex contains approximately 14–16 billion neurons, and the estimated number of neurons in the cerebellum is 55–70 billion. Each neuron is connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons.

Human brain

The human brain is the central organ of the human nervous system, and with the spinal cord makes up the central nervous system. The brain consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. It controls most of the activities of the body, processing, integrating, and coordinating the information it receives from the sense organs, and making decisions as to the instructions sent to the rest of the body. The brain is contained in, and protected by, the skull bones of the head.

Histone deacetylase

Histone deacetylases (, HDAC) are a class of enzymes that remove acetyl groups (O=C-CH3) from an ε-N-acetyl lysine amino acid on both histone and non-histone proteins. HDACs allow histones to wrap the DNA more tightly. This is important because DNA is wrapped around histones, and DNA expression is regulated by acetylation and de-acetylation. HDAC's action is opposite to that of histone acetyltransferase. HDAC proteins are now also called lysine deacetylases (KDAC), to describe their function rather than their target, which also includes non-histone proteins.

Related lectures (36)

Epigenetic Biomarkers of Traumata

Explores epigenetic mechanisms in memory formation, trauma, and aging, focusing on biomarkers and HDAC inhibitors.

Understanding Proprioception: Neural Network Models

Explores how neural networks can help understand proprioception and muscle contraction.

Neuroepigenetics: Chromatin Structure and Regulation

Explores neuroepigenetics, focusing on chromatin structure, regulation, and epigenetic inheritance in neurodevelopment.

Cellular Mechanisms of Brain Function MOOC: Cellular Mechanisms of Brain Function

Series explores the biophysics of neurons and synapses, synaptic transmission, and brain function.

Neuroepigenetics: Chromatin Regulation and Memory Formation