FRC funding for Pierre Trifilieff

Pierre Trifilieff, who co-leads the FoodCircus team at NutriNeuro, has received funding from the Fondation pour la Recherche sur le Cerveau (FRC) for his project entitled ‘Implication du statut lipidique dans les troubles de fonctions exécutives : rôle des transmissions monoaminergiques préfrontales’ (‘Implication of lipid status in executive function disorders: role of prefrontal monoaminergic transmissions’).

This funding from the FRC  will enable his team to consolidate its collaboration with Etienne Coutureau (INCIA), who will be combining their expertise to gain a better understanding of the neurobiological basis of executive control disorders.

Summary of the project

The goal of this project is to establish the causal mechanistic link between a shared symptom of many psychiatric disorders, i.e. deficits in executive functions, with a biological endophenotype that has been largely overlooked: a decrease in n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acid (PUFA) lipid species. Based on strong preliminary data, we hypothesize that developmental n-3 PUFA deficiency leads to impairments in executive control through a perturbation of dopaminergic and noradrenergic transmissions in discrete areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The objectives are to i) uncover the impact of n-3 PUFA deficiency on the dynamics of neurotransmitters in the PFC during decision-making tasks, ii) assess whether restoring dopaminergic or noradrenergic transmission in the PFC can rescue deficits induced by n-3 PUFA deficiency and iii) determine if preventing n-3 PUFA deficiency in dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurons is sufficient to restore behavioral deficits. 

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More details (in french) : https://www.frcneurodon.org/