Anand Gururajan – MSCA Fellow

Dr Anand Gururajan received his Bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from the University of South Australia (Adelaide, Australia) and then his PhD in Behavioural Pharmacology from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia).  His doctoral thesis was focused on evaluating the antipsychotic potential of cannabidiol, a derivative of the cannabis sativa plant.  For his first postdoctoral position, he explored interactions between various genetic and environmental risk factors implicated in anxiety and depression at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health (Melbourne, Australia).  In 2015, he moved to Cork to join Professor John Cryan’s group and worked on a HRB-funded project to identify biomarkers for the diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression.  He was granted the Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship in 2016 to pursue his interest in stress research and further strengthen his academic profile.

Project Title: DE-STRESS: Decoding Stress Resilience

PI: Professor John F Cryan

Year of Award: 2016

Description of the project: Chronic stress is a major risk factor for the onset of various psychopathologies.  However, not all who are exposed go on to develop symptomatology, a phenomenon termed stress resilience.  Various neuromolecular mediators of stress resilience have been identified such as microRNAs which are non-coding RNAs that regulate gene-expression at the post-transcriptional level.  Several key limbic structures have been implicated as regulators of the stress response, namely the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and the hippocampus.  Their effects on the HPA axis are via subthalamic relay structures such as the bed nucleus stria terminalis (BNST).  Thus the BNST is centrally placed to ‘fine-tune’ the response to stress and may play a role in determining whether an individual is stress resilient or stress susceptible. The aim of the DE-STRESS project is to identify microRNAs in the BNST which correlate with behavioural and physiological readouts of stress resilience and stress susceptibility.

E-mail:  anand.gururajan@ucc.ie