Samuel Centanni
Wake Forest University, NC·Neuroscience
Why do some people move from casual drinking to alcohol use disorder (AUD) while others never do? Stress is closely tied to alcohol use, and finding early warning signs of risk could shift care from treating addiction after it appears toward preventing it, much as doctors already screen for heart disease and diabetes.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Psychology
- Topics
alcohol use disorder
binge drinking
stress
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Test whether stress-driven activity in the insula-BNST pathway predicts later binge and aversion-resistant ethanol drinking, following mouse models of stress and binge drinking over time.
- Identify changes in insula-BNST circuit neurons after stress and alcohol exposure in mice, and relate them to compulsive-like drinking and hyperkatifeia (negative mood during abstinence).
- Compare gene activity in the insula-BNST circuit after stress versus binge alcohol using RNA sequencing, to find shared molecular signatures of stress and AUD-related behavior.
- Validate the top molecular targets by silencing them in the insula-BNST circuit with shRNA knockdown (short RNAs that turn genes down) and measuring the effect on binge alcohol drinking in mice.
More about the research
This project asks whether the way a specific brain circuit responds to stress can predict later problem drinking.
Why it matters
Treatments and diagnostic tools for alcohol use disorder are limited. By identifying brain-circuit and gene-activity signatures that come before dependence, this work could help link molecular and genetic biomarkers with activity-based digital biomarkers. Such markers could eventually support earlier risk assessment, diagnosis and intervention for people at risk of developing AUD, before the disorder takes hold.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Subhash Pandey
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether EZH2, an enzyme that adds methyl tags to histones, controls synaptic genes, electrical activity, synapse structure and anxiety-like behavior in the central amygdala of male and female rats during alcohol withdrawal, and examine these genes in postmortem human AUD amygdala.
Amy Lasek
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Neuroscience
Map alcohol-induced changes in the cortical extracellular matrix, or "matrisome," using quantitative proteomics and glycomics in mice after six weeks of binge-like drinking in the dark, and compare them with transcriptome datasets.
Brady Atwood
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience
Test whether oxycodone increases tau protein expression, phosphorylation and oligomerization (clumping) in the mouse prefrontal cortex, and whether these changes cause synaptic dysfunction.
The school
Wake Forest University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $345M a year on research, 54 research doctorates a year.
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