Our study “Tonic and burst-like locus coeruleus stimulation distinctly shift network activity across the cortical hierarchy” has been published in Nature Neuroscience. By combining optogenetics with functional brain imaging, we find that during moderate tonic locus coeruleus activation in mice, noradrenaline release engages cortical regions related to associative processing. In contrast, burst-like stimulation biases the brain toward sensory processing.

ETH Zurich launches the 3R Hub to establish methods that improve animal experiments. Affiliated with the lab of Prof. Johannes Bohacek, the hub focuses on the 3Rs – the three foundational principles of animal experimentation to which the ETH is committed: Replace, Reduce and Refine. The 3R Hub raises awareness among researchers and the public about compassionate animal research, and provides hands-on solutions for labs interested in establishing 3R-related methods.

Our study "Noradrenaline release from the locus coeruleus shapes stress-induced hippocampal gene expression" has been published in eLife. We combine circuit neuroscience tools like optogenetics with transcriptomic analyses to identify a set of stress-induced genes that are activated by noradrenaline in the mouse brain.

Johannes Bohacek has been appointed as Director of Studies for the bachelor and master of “Health Sciences and Technology”