GUILLERMINA LÓPEZ BENDITO

GUILLERMINA LÓPEZ BENDITO

Bio

I was born in the Dominican Republic during the hurricane season, taking the second name of Eloisa in memory of the hurricane raging as I was born. Maybe that’s why I’m so afraid of the wind! I have always loved to explore, investigate, look for answers and maybe that’s why I studied Biology. I went to the University of Alicante and one fine day a professor from the Institute of Neurosciences came in search of “minds” and I got on board, 21 years ago.

I did my doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Neurosciences with Alfonso Fairén and Rafael Luján and I learnt a lot from them about the brain, but apart from all that, I learnt that this career depends on you alone, being tenacious, constant and strong-willed. After finishing my doctoral dissertation, I went off to Oxford, a little in awe of this challenge, but very excited about my English adventure. I joined Zoltán Molnár´s laboratory where I learnt all about the development of neuronal connections, the thalamus and how important it is to speak English! It was a wonderful time, I really enjoyed it and I fell in love with the thalamocortical system, the model that I am still working on today.

After four years in Oxford, I came back to Spain, to the Institute of Neurosciences with a Ramón y Cajal contract hosted by Oscar Marín’s laboratory where I acquired the tools to start my group. Three years after returning to Spain, I secured a position at the CSIC, more than 10 years ago now. In the meantime, I met my current partner, also a brain researcher, and we have had two children, the most important things in my life, putting everything else into perspective. Over all this time, we have grown, we have all matured and now the laboratory is a large exciting group of people committed to learning something new every day on the thalamus and its connections.

ERC Project: “SENSORTHALAMUS”

The thalamus is a symmetrical structure located in the centre of the brain, formed by two egg-shaped halves joined by its front sides. The size of a walnut, the thalamus works like a controller for all the information that reaches the brain from the senses, except for the sense of smell. Its job is to select the relevant data to send it to the cerebral cortex where it will be processed. Without this filtering task, the cerebral cortex would collapse due to excess information. The connections between these two regions of the brain, known as thalamocortical, are set early in embryonic development and they are reasonably mature at birth.

The thalamus is also essential to adapt when one of the senses is not properly developed or is completely lost before birth, a process known as early sensory deprivation.

Thanks to this thalamus-mediated capacity to adapt, known as plasticity, defects affecting the senses can be compensated by strengthening others. Guillermina López Bendito’s research group uses mice with no retina, essential for vision, or without cochlea, fundamental for hearing, to study what happens in the cerebral cortex zone that is in charge of processing visual or audio information, respectively, when it is missing.

With her work, she has discovered that the area of the cerebral cortex that processes information from the mice’s whiskers, equivalent to our sense of touch, increases 15% to compensate for lack of vision. As the researcher López Bendito explained, “this is what’s relevant because it is not due to experience, as up to 15 days after birth, normal mice still have their eyes and ears closed. And it means that the brain detects that the retina is not working and sets off the necessary changes to compensate for lack of vision before birth, when the eyes are not yet operative. And the structure that measures these adaptations is precisely the thalamus.” The aim of this line of research for Guillermina López’s group is to find a way of restoring damaged sensory circuits. To do this, they work on reprogramming a type of cell from the brain, known as astrocytes, that they hope to convert into neurones to restore affected senses.

Bio

I was born in the Dominican Republic during the hurricane season, taking the second name of Eloisa in memory of the hurricane raging as I was born. Maybe that’s why I’m so afraid of the wind! I have always loved to explore, investigate, look for answers and maybe that’s why I studied Biology. I went to the University of Alicante and one fine day a professor from the Institute of Neurosciences came in search of “minds” and I got on board, 21 years ago.

I did my doctoral dissertation at the Institute of Neurosciences with Alfonso Fairén and Rafael Luján and I learnt a lot from them about the brain, but apart from all that, I learnt that this career depends on you alone, being tenacious, constant and strong-willed. After finishing my doctoral dissertation, I went off to Oxford, a little in awe of this challenge, but very excited about my English adventure. I joined Zoltán Molnár´s laboratory where I learnt all about the development of neuronal connections, the thalamus and how important it is to speak English! It was a wonderful time, I really enjoyed it and I fell in love with the thalamocortical system, the model that I am still working on today.

After four years in Oxford, I came back to Spain, to the Institute of Neurosciences with a Ramón y Cajal contract hosted by Oscar Marín’s laboratory where I acquired the tools to start my group. Three years after returning to Spain, I secured a position at the CSIC, more than 10 years ago now. In the meantime, I met my current partner, also a brain researcher, and we have had two children, the most important things in my life, putting everything else into perspective. Over all this time, we have grown, we have all matured and now the laboratory is a large exciting group of people committed to learning something new every day on the thalamus and its connections.

ERC Project: “SENSORTHALAMUS”

The thalamus is a symmetrical structure located in the centre of the brain, formed by two egg-shaped halves joined by its front sides. The size of a walnut, the thalamus works like a controller for all the information that reaches the brain from the senses, except for the sense of smell. Its job is to select the relevant data to send it to the cerebral cortex where it will be processed. Without this filtering task, the cerebral cortex would collapse due to excess information. The connections between these two regions of the brain, known as thalamocortical, are set early in embryonic development and they are reasonably mature at birth.

The thalamus is also essential to adapt when one of the senses is not properly developed or is completely lost before birth, a process known as early sensory deprivation.

Thanks to this thalamus-mediated capacity to adapt, known as plasticity, defects affecting the senses can be compensated by strengthening others. Guillermina López Bendito’s research group uses mice with no retina, essential for vision, or without cochlea, fundamental for hearing, to study what happens in the cerebral cortex zone that is in charge of processing visual or audio information, respectively, when it is missing.

With her work, she has discovered that the area of the cerebral cortex that processes information from the mice’s whiskers, equivalent to our sense of touch, increases 15% to compensate for lack of vision. As the researcher López Bendito explained, “this is what’s relevant because it is not due to experience, as up to 15 days after birth, normal mice still have their eyes and ears closed. And it means that the brain detects that the retina is not working and sets off the necessary changes to compensate for lack of vision before birth, when the eyes are not yet operative. And the structure that measures these adaptations is precisely the thalamus.” The aim of this line of research for Guillermina López’s group is to find a way of restoring damaged sensory circuits. To do this, they work on reprogramming a type of cell from the brain, known as astrocytes, that they hope to convert into neurones to restore affected senses.