Decoding the neurobiology of social interactions: an interview with Camilla Bellone
Camilla Bellone is an Associate Professor at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), whose lab investigates the molecular mechanisms and circuits underlying social interaction. When researching drug addiction, Bellone became fascinated by the reward system, particularly natural reward, so decided to study the most rewarding natural incentive: social interaction. After encountering difficulties as a postdoc when trying to correlate synaptic changes to behavior, Bellone’s lab takes a top-down approach, starting with behavioral analysis and then going down to study the synaptic and circuit correlates of behavior.
In this interview from the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting (SfN; 11–15 November 2023, Washington, DC, USA), Bellone discusses the techniques used to study the neurobiology of social interaction, the importance of collaboration and the potential of non-invasive brain stimulation.
What was your Special Lecture about?
My lecture gave me the opportunity to review the work that I’ve done so far and what we’re currently doing in the lab on constructing a research framework to study the neurocircuit of social motivation, both in physiological conditions and in pathological conditions. In the beginning, I was interested in autism spectrum disorder from the perspective of social deficit, but the frustrating question was, what does social deficit mean? I never had a convincing answer from a clinician. So, I decided to try to construct a research framework that allowed me to better understand social deficit and what it means.
What techniques do you use to investigate this?
We span from behavioral analysis with machine learning down to electrophysiology, both in vivo and in vitro. The idea is to go from the behavior to the circuit down to the synapses. I’m not driven by the technique itself but by the question…