In patients with Huntington’s disease, neurons in a part of the brain called the striatum are among the hardest hit. Degeneration of these neurons contributes to patients’ loss of motor control, one of the major hallmarks of the disease. Neuroscientists at MIT have now shown that two distinct cell populations in the striatum are affected differently by Huntington’s disease. The researchers hope that their mapping of the striatum could help lead to new treatments targeting specific brain cells.

After decades of fundamental scientific and drug discovery research, Alzheimer’s disease has remained inscrutable and incurable, with a bare minimum of therapeutic progress. But in a new review article in Nature Neuroscience, MIT scientists write that by employing the new research capability of single-cell profiling, the field has rapidly achieved long-sought insights with strong potential for both explaining Alzheimer’s disease and doing something meaningful about it.

Fernanda De La Torre went through a long journey before becoming a doctoral student in BCS. She grew up in Mexico and crossed the border to the United States by foot at the age of 12. For years she was unhoused and undocumented, trying to navigate her education and path to citizenship. Today De La Torre is a PhD student working in two different labs: Josh McDermott’s lab, where she works on multisensory perception, and Robert Yang’s MetaConscious Lab, where she uses neural networks to explore questions about self-awareness.