Alexandre Charlet

Fellowship 2014

ARCHIVE

Alexandre Charlet is a young CNRS investigator (CR2) at the Institute of Cellular and Integrative Neurosciences (INCI CNRS UPR 3212). In 2006, he joined Pr. Pierrick Poisbeau’s team for a PhD based on the evaluation of spontaneous pain through the analysis of autonomous nervous system. He defends his PhD in 2009, awarded by the Chantal Autissier award from the AFSTAL. He then comes to Dr. Ron Stoop lab to study the modulation of amygdala microcircuitery by central oxytocin and build up a strong collaboration with De. Valery Grinevich from Heidelberg in order to develop the requested optogenetics tools in order to study the function of endogenous oxytocin. These works were awarded by the Swiss Society for Biological Society in 2012 and by the French Académie Nationale de Médecine in 2013. He is finally recruited by CNRS in 2013 and study, in a first project granted by IASP (Early Career Research Grant), Europe (FP7 Career Integration Grant) and IDEX (Attractivity), the contribution of the neuron-glia interactions to the oxytocinergic modulation of amygdala circuits.

News:

Marking a paradigm shift in the study of neuropeptides, Dr. Charlet's team has identified a new player in oxytocinergic modulation: astrocytes: Wahis et al (2021) Astrocytes mediate the effect of oxytocin in the central amygdala on neuronal activity and affective states in rodents. Nat Neurosci. 2021 Apr;24(4):529-541.

Maurice Girard Prize 2016, by the French National Academy of Pharmacy

Guy Ourisson Prize 2021, by the Cercle Gutenberg

Deciphering the oxytocinergic neuronal population involved in the pain matrix

Post-doc: Mai Isawaki

Pain is a complex phenomenon involving several brain structures grouped together in the “pain matrix”. The key structures responsible for the emotional aspect of pain, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the central amygdala (CeA), are innervated by axonal hypothalamic oxytocin (OT) projections. Based on the new possibilities offered by virus manipulations, we propose to perform a fine spatio-temporal identification and functional characterization of OT projections to the ACC and the CeA activated during a painful episode. Key assets to the project are the use (i) of optogenetic manipulation of the OT population and (ii) of the vGAIT approach in order to flag and manipulate pain-activated OT neurons.

If successful, this USIAS project will provide a major contribution to our understanding of the role of oxytocin in pain processing in key structures of the pain matrix. We expect that our integrative analyses, from virus engineering to behavioural studies, will clearly decipher the involvement of oxytocin neurons in pain.

We expect that besides the results obtained on oxytocin, this study will result in the generalization of optogenetic tools for neuropeptides. Indeed, though optogenetics is nowadays widely used, only a few studies concern neuropeptides because of the challenge it represents.

Additionally, our results will shed light on our general comprehension of the pain matrix operations, resulting in a potentially more adapted treatment of patients suffering from chronic pain. A better understanding of pain processing will be of tremendous importance for the scientific and clinical fields.