The National Academy of Medicine recently announced the election of more than 90 members during its annual meeting, including MIT faculty members Matthew Vander Heiden and Fan Wang, along with five MIT alumni. Wang’s research focuses on the neural circuits governing the bidirectional interactions between the brain and body. She is specifically interested in the circuits that control the sensory and emotional aspects of pain and addiction, as well as the sensory and motor circuits that work together to execute behaviors such as eating, drinking, and moving. The National Academy of Medicine has recognized her body of work for “providing the foundational knowledge to develop new therapies to treat chronic pain and movement disorders.”

Within the human brain, movement is coordinated by a brain region called the striatum, which sends instructions to motor neurons in the brain. Those instructions are conveyed by two pathways, one that initiates movement (“go”) and one that suppresses it (“no-go”). MIT researchers have discovered an additional two pathways that arise in the striatum and appear to modulate the effects of the go and no-go pathways. These newly discovered pathways connect to dopamine-producing neurons in the brain — one stimulates dopamine release and the other inhibits it. By controlling the amount of dopamine in the brain via clusters of neurons known as striosomes, these pathways appear to modify the instructions given by the go and no-go pathways. They may be especially involved in influencing decisions that have a strong emotional component, the researchers say.

A classical way to image nanoscale structures in cells is with high-powered, expensive super-resolution microscopes. As an alternative, MIT researchers have developed a way to expand tissue before imaging it — a technique that allows them to achieve nanoscale resolution with a conventional light microscope. In the newest version of this technique, the researchers have made it possible to expand tissue 20-fold in a single step. This simple, inexpensive method could pave the way for nearly any biology lab to perform nanoscale imaging.