23.02.2025Congratulations to Dr. Cristine Marie Yde Ohki

Congratulations to Dr. Cristine Marie Yde Ohki for being awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship. We are honored to have supervised her for the past four and a half years as a doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher in our Translational Molecular Psychiatry laboratory, and to continue collaborating with her on the MSCA project.

The project entitled ELEGANCE (acronym for “ELucidating the Effects of Gut micrbiota-derived metAbolites iN iPSC-derived co-Cultures from ADHD patiEnts”) was one of the 1696 awarded proposals out of 10’360 applications to the 2024 call of MSCA postdoctoral fellowships. ELEGANCE primarily aims to generate, for the first time, co-cultures of microglia and dopaminergic neurons from induced pluripotent stem cells from adult ADHD patients and matching healthy controls. By using these models, the researchers will be able to study cellular and molecular phenotypes in vitro (e.g., neuroinflammatory and oxidative stress markers, and cellular metabolism) that may result from the interaction between these cell types. If any basal alterations between ADHD and control are seen in this context, gut microbiota-derived metabolites that have been described as beneficial will be tested for the observation of potential restoration effects. On the other hand, the cellular effects caused by potentially detrimental gut microbiota-derived metabolites will also be examined.

The project will be conducted at the APC Microbiome Ireland, a research centre at the University College Cork, and under the supervision of Prof. Sarah Kittel-Schneider and co-supervision of Prof. Gerard Clarke.