Defne attended FENS 2026 in Barcelona to present her work with Mert on "Projection-Specific Control of Affective and Social Behavior by Ventral Pallidum Dlx-Expressing GABAergic Neurons in Rats", while also taking some time to discover the many beauties of Barcelona, from Gaudí's architectural masterpieces and culinary delights of the notoriously tourist-friendly city of Barcelona.
The first face-to-face Working Group 4 meeting of the AFFECT-EVO COST Action, focused on improving treatments for affective disorders across species, was held at the University of Pécs on 24-25 June 2026.
The meeting was highly productive and generated several promising ideas for future collaborative research and initiatives.
More information about AFFECT-EVO can be found here: https://affect-evo.eu/
Dr. Ünal was awarded the 2025 Research Incentive Award by the Parlar Foundation at Middle East Technical University.
We are grateful to the Foundation for recognizing our research in systems neuroscience.
More information about the 2025 award recipients can be found here: https://parlar.org.tr/sayfa-2025-yili-odulleri-84
Dr. Ünal was invited to speak at the 2025 Swiss Laboratory Animal Science Association (SGV) Meeting in Zürich, where he delivered a lecture on the construct validity and translational relevance of rodent tests of affect, generating further interest and discussion around our well-cited review paper on the same topic.
In this paper we investigated the behavioral and neural effects of orally administered ketamine in adult rats. Animals received either saline or ketamine at 15, 30, or 45 mg/kg and were tested in the forced swim test, open field, fear conditioning, and elevated plus maze. We also examined changes in brain activity and NMDA receptor subunits using protein assays and immunohistochemistry. The highest dose (45 mg/kg) reduced immobility in the forced swim test, briefly impaired fear memory, and lowered stress-related vocalizations.
Defne and Sinem attended the FENS Regional Meeting (FRM) 2025, held from June 16–19 in Oslo, Norway, where they presented two posters: Functional and Neurochemical Characterization of CaMKIIα-Expressing Neurons in the Ventral Pallidum and Dopaminergic Circuitry in the Japanese Quail: Fiber Analysis and Synaptic Targets in the Nidopallium Caudolaterale.
In this study, we investigated the role of ERα in the heightened sensitivity of female animals to ketamine’s antidepressant effects. This well-documented sex difference is thought to stem from the faster ketamine metabolism observed in females, potentially regulated by ERα through enzymatic modulation. However, our results indicate that ERα antagonism did not influence behavioral despair in the FST. An interaction between MPP and ketamine emerged in anxiety-like behaviors assessed in the OFT and EPM, though post-hoc analyses did not reveal significant effects.
We have finally published our long-term study on a novel animal–robot interaction paradigm that enables bidirectional learning between rats and robots. As Steinbeck stated, “If you understand each other, you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.” This idea appears to extend to animals and robots as well. In both our in silico and in vivo tests, rat-robot pairs that successfully interpreted each other’s signals adjusted their actions to maximize rewards, fostering mutual learning.
We have published our long-term study on ventral pallidum-amygdala innervation in collaboration with Dr. Nair’s Neural Engineering Laboratory at the University of Missouri. By combining anatomical and computational approaches, we explored whether basal forebrain (BF) projections to the amygdaloid complex modulate local network activity in a manner analogous to the well-characterized septo-hippocampal pathway.
