Camilla Bellone facts for kids

Camilla Bellone (born c. 1975) is an Italian neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. Bellone's laboratory explores the molecular mechanisms and neural circuits underlying social behavior and probes how defects at the molecular and circuit level give rise to psychiatric disease states such as Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Early life and education

Bellone was born in Italy in 1975. Bellone studied pharmacology at the University of Milano in 1998, and found a mentor in Monica Di Luca, a neuropharmacologist. She completed her Master's in Pharmacy. Bellone became fascinated by neuroscience and developed a passion for answering the many unknown questions about brain function. In Di Luca's lab, Bellone studied protein-protein interactions and signalling pathways in the postsynaptic compartment as well as the role of PSD-95 in neuronal stability and homeostasis.

Bellone stayed at the University of Milano to begin her graduate studies exploring the molecular biology and structural composition of the synapse. Bellone realized that she wanted to go beyond protein-protein interactions and explore synaptic activity and dynamic function. Bellone reached out to Christian Lüscher at the University of Geneva because he was exploring synaptic plasticity and synaptic transmission. Lüscher accepted Bellone into his lab and the University of Milan continue to fund her PhD abroad, so Bellone moved to Geneva.

Bellone completed her PhD and joined the lab of Roger Nicoll at the University of California, San Francisco. Shortly after joining the Nicoll Lab, Bellone published a first author paper in Neuron exploring the trafficking of NMDA receptors in hippocampal pyramidal cells in newborn mice.

In 2007, Bellone returned to Switzerland planning to pursue a career in academia. From 2007 until 2011, Bellone worked in Lüscher's lab as a Maître Assistante where she began to transition from the mentored-phase of her career to an independent career.

Career and research

In 2010, Bellone was awarded the Ambizione Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, a grant meant to support young researchers in starting their own independent projects at Swiss higher education institutions. For Bellone, this grant helped her to transition towards an independent career in neuroscience. Bellone had the idea to use her diverse skills from exploring the dopaminergic reward system towards exploring this system in the context of social reward.

In 2014, Bellone applied to the University of Lausanne to start her own lab. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Bellone became an assistant professor in the Department of Fundamental Neuroscience at the University of Lausanne. Her lab at UNIL focused on understanding the development of the brain's reward circuitry, the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system, in mouse models. Using various techniques, both in vivo and ex vivo, Bellone explored how perturbations to this circuitry affect social motivation. Bellone's work aims to help understand the neural basis for complex social behaviors and how this circuitry might be implicated in psychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant social behaviors, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Bellone applied for a position back at the University of Geneva. She was offered a position in 2016 as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor to the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva. Bellone's lab at the University of Geneva continues to probe the dopaminergic neural circuits underlying social behavior in mice as a means to better our understanding of how dysfunction in these circuits may lead to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental diseases.

Bellone joined the 2016 NCCR-SYNAPSY project, an initiative started in 2010 to understand the synaptic bases of mental diseases by bringing together basic scientists with clinical scientists in an effort to create translational collaborations. Bellone collaborates closely with psychiatrists and clinical scientists to inspire translational research surrounding ASD.

Bellone is on the editorial board for the European Journal of Neuroscience, a Reviewer for Nat. Neurosci., J. Neuroscience, Neuroscience, Neural Plasticity, Frontiers, and PNAS, on the editorial board for Scientific Reports, responsible for the unit "Comment notre environnement influence-t-il la prise de drogue?" Brain week at the University of Geneva, a Member of the FENS-KAVLI network of excellence, on the Evaluation Committee (EvCo) for the SNSF Advanced Postdoc Mobility fellowships (domain Medicine), and a member of Society for Neuroscience, where she has spoken about career development for women in science through her talk "My Personal Journey From Synapse to Circuit to Behavior".

Social reward circuitry

Bellone sought to explore the connection between altered synaptic proteins and impaired social behaviors, merging her previous research experience with her new independent career interests. Reading genetic studies of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Bellone found that many genes associated with ASD are implicated in scaffolding of both ionotropic and metabotropic glutamate receptors. While they found impairments in social behavior upon modulation of glutamate receptor scaffolding genes, they suggest that a better understanding of the neural circuits driving social behavior is needed to understand the mechanisms that drive aberrant social behavior in disease.

Following this finding, Bellone and her colleagues worked to develop a disease model of ASD with which to probe social neural circuit function. Using shRNA, they modelled Shank3, a synapse scaffolding protein known to be implicated in ASD phenotypes, insufficiency in the VTA of mice. They found that mice exhibited impaired social preferences and abnormal excitatory transmission which reduced the output of VTA DA neurons. Bellone and her team however, were able to modulate DA neuron activity both pharmacologically, by allosterically activating mGlur1s, and optogenetically, to enhance social preference and partially restore social behavior.

In a recent collaboration with researchers at UNIL, Bellone explored neuroimmune and μ-opioid receptor-driven effects on sociability. They found that μ-opioid receptor activation causes microglial release of TNF-a, a pro-inflammatory cytokine. When TNF-a binds to its receptor on neurons, this leads to a subsequent reduction in AMPAR transmission in raphe-projecting lateral habenula neurons and results in social impairment in mice.

Awards and honors

• 2004 Swiss Society for Neuroscience travel fellowship
• 2010 FENS/IBRO travel grant
• 2010 Ambizione grant from Swiss National Science Foundation
• 2012 Gertrude Von Meissner Foundation prize
• 2014 2014 Fondation du Prix Pfizer de la Recherche
• 2014 Professor Boursier Scholarship from Swiss National Science Foundation
• 2014-2018 FENS- KAVLI Scholar
• 2015 FENS-KAVLI network of Excellence

Select publications

• Sebastiano Bariselli, Stamatina Tzanoulinou, Christelle Glangetas, Clément Prévost-Solié, Luca Pucci, Joanna Viguié, Paola Bezzi, Eoin C O'Connor, François Georges, Christian Lüscher & Camilla Bellone. SHANK3 controls maturation of social reward circuits in the VTA. Nat. Neurosci. Nat Neurosci. 2016 Jul;19(7):926-34. I.F. 15.5
• Kehoe LA, Bellone C, De Roo M, Zandueta A, Dey PN, Pérez-Otaño I, Muller D. GluN3A promotes dendritic spine pruning and destabilization during postnatal development. J Neurosci. 2014 Jul 9;34(28):9213-21. I.F. 6.91
• Gabrielle Pouchelon, Frédéric Gambino, Camilla Bellone, Christian Lüscher, Anthony Holtmaat, Denis Jabaudon. Rewiring of distinct thalamocortical inputs instructs the modality-specific identity of postsynaptic L4 neurons. Nature. 2014 Jul 24;511(7510):471-4 I.F. 38.6
• De la Rossa A*, Bellone C*, Golding B, Vitali I, Moss J, Toni N, Lüscher C, Jabaudon D, In vivo reprogramming of circuit connectivity in postmitotic neocortical neurons, Nature Neuroscience, 2013, 6:193-200. *equal contribution.
• Bellone C., Lüscher C., Mameli M.. Mechanisms of synaptic depression triggered by metabotropic glutamate receptors. Cell. Mol. Life Science 2008 Sep;65(18):2913-23. Review.
• Bellone C. and Nicoll R.. Rapid bidirectional switching of synaptic NMDA receptors. Neuron 2007 :779-85 (IF 13.9)
• Bellone C. and Lüscher C.. mGluRs induce a long-term depression in the ventral tegmental area that involves a switch of the subunit composition of AMPA receptors. Eur J Neurosci. 2005 :1280-8. (IF 3.7)
• Gardoni F., Bellone C., Viviani B., Marinovich M., Cattabeni F. and Di Luca M.. Lack of PSD-95 drives hippocampal but not cortical neuronal death through aCaMKII/AMPA potentiation . Eur J Neurosci. 2002 :7 (IF 3.7)
• Gardoni F., Kamal A., Bellone C., Biessels GJ., Ramakers GMJ., Cattabeni F., Gispen WH.and Di Luca M.. Effects of streptozotocin-Diabetes on the hippocampal NMDA receptor complex in rats. J. Neurochem, 2002 :438-47. (IF 4.3)
• Gardoni F., Bellone C., Cattabeni F. and Di Luca M.. PKC activation modulates aCaMKII binding to NR2A subunit of NMDA receptor complex. J.Biol.Chem 2001 : 7609-7613 (IF 5.8)