Lioba Berndt

We’re now busily back-translating to mice to test these predictions alongside some drugs that might help. 🐁

In-silico pharmacological modelling suggests increasing NMDA receptor gain as a potential therapeutic target, implying NMDA receptor hypofunction as a key driver of sleep alterations in these high-risk individuals.

We combine sleep EEG (recorded in the comfort of people’s homes) with Dynamic Causal Modeling to flag mechanisms of synaptic pathology in young people at risk of psychiatric disorders.

Sleep as a window into thalamocortical pathology: generative modeling implicates NMDA receptor hypofunction in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome Background: 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) is a strong genetic risk factor for neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability. Sleep disturbance...

🧠 New pre-print out:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Huge thanks to everyone that made this project possible: Daisy Crawley, Lana Tymchyk, Anna Hall, Jakub Onysk, Tore Erdmann, Elliot Wimmer @elliottwimmer.bsky.social, Isabel Berwian, Agnes Norbury @agnesnorbury.bsky.social and Quentin Huys @docqhuys.bsky.social!

New preprint:
How does Behavioral Activation help with anhedonia in depression?

Our new study finds that early reductions in aversive Pavlovian Bias mediate symptom improvement - suggesting a specific cognitive mechanism in realistic treatment settings.

Read more here:

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Computational psychiatry as a bridge from neuroscience to clinical applications - Nature Neuroscience The complexity of problems and data in psychiatry requires powerful computational approaches. Computational psychiatry is an emerging field encompassing mechanistic theory-driven models and theoretica...

I think this paper explains the concept of Computational Psychiatry really well: doi.org/10.1038/nn.4...

UCL-led research reveals new protein map with potential to transform disease research UCL researchers have developed The Encyclopedia of Domains (TED), a tool mapping millions of unknown protein regions, with potential for breakthroughs in drug discovery and disease research.

Our recent work TED: The Encyclopedia of Domains showcased by UCL: 365 million domain like structures identified in the AlphaFold DB, 194 million with proposed assignments to CATH superfamilies, plus a catalogue of domain-domain interactions.
www.ucl.ac.uk/computer-sci...