NWO grant awarded to Mohit Dubey

NWO has awarded a grant to Mohit Dubey as part of the open ENW-XS competition.

The Open Competition Domain Science – XS grant is intended to support promising ideas and to facilitate innovative and more speculative initiatives within the seven Domain Science disciplines. The proposed research is ground-breaking and challenging. What counts is that all results, be they positive or negative, must contribute to the advancement of science.

Dubey’s research will explore the sleeping brain in a mouse model for multiple sclerosis (MS). During sleep, our brains recreate the objects, actions, and emotions that we experience during waking hours, with a perceived recollection of these events. Our brains accomplish this by synchronising their electrical activity, thereby recalling memories of events experienced during the day. This process appears to be crucial for the well-functioning brain.

People with MS experience problems with their sleep, but the exact mechanism behind these sleep-problems remains unknown and could play an important role in understanding disease progression and recovery.

So far, technical challenges have limited our understanding of cell-type activity during natural sleep-wake cycles. In this project, Dubey will use arecording natural sleep in a mouse model for MS. This technology will provide unprecedented resolution to the functional dynamics of specific cell types and its impact on sleep and MS.