News — Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG)

A photographic image showing Cholinergic interneuron networks (green) embedded within dense matrix of dopamine axon arbours and varicosities in mouse striatum (red).

New Cragg lab paper published in Nature Neuroscience - Acetylcholine and dopamine: friends or foes?

17 March 2025

Examples of cholinergic interneurons (red) with a 'satellite' astrocyte (green). Cell nuclei are blue

Researchers given $6 million for ground-breaking research to tackle Parkinson’s

10 January 2025

a) Confocal fluoroscent microscope image from human striatum showing a cholinergic interneuron (ChI, red), and a soma-to-soma "satellite" astrocyte in close apposition (Astrocyte, green). b) Schematic depiction summarizing the main results. Through this privileged interaction, striatum astrocytes can rapidly modulate neuronal excitability and downstream dopamine release through a calcium-dependent mechanism.

Colleagues from the Cragg Group publish new research In Nature Communications on the effect of modulation of astrocytes in striatum on dopamine release

28 November 2024

Inaugural winners of the DPAG Prize for Public Engagement with Research announced

11 January 2023

Congratulations are in order for the winners Katherine Brimblecombe and Anna Kordala, and also to Jéssica Luiz and Andia Redpath who were highly commended for their outreach and public engagement work.

Winners of the DPAG Student Poster Day 2022 announced

11 November 2022

"A Year of Progress" was held in the Sherrington Library on Wednesday 9 November 2022.

Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre awarded £3.8 million to reveal the role of calcium in Parkinson’s

29 April 2022

A collaborative research team led by the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre (OPDC) has been awarded a £3.8 million Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award to study the function of calcium in dopamine neurons, and how this is plays a role in Parkinson’s. Their research will help explain how and why dopamine neurons are vulnerable in the disease and look at how they may be preserved.

My Primary School Visit for Science Week

21 April 2022

On 2 March 2022, Dr Katherine Brimblecombe visited two primary school classes (ages 8-11) as part of their “Science week”. Read her interview to learn more about public engagement with school children in the local Oxford community.

A striatal spiny projection neuron labelled with neurobiotin (scale bar 20 µm; inset 2 µm).

New insights into the role of dopamine in reinforcement learning

11 March 2022

A new study from Dr Yanfeng Zhang has uncovered the first evidence that dopamine-dependent long-term potentiation is also gated by the pause of striatal cholinergic interneurons and the depolarisation of the striatal spiny projection neurons. This discovery overturns previous ideas that the phasic dopamine release is the only factor gate corticostriatal synaptic plasticity, thus changing our understanding of dopamine functions in reinforcement learning.

Mapping uncharted networks in the progression of Parkinson’s

26 October 2021

A major new $9 million project funded by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative will map the original circuits vulnerable to Parkinson’s on an unprecedented scale. The project is a collaboration between core investigators Stephanie Cragg, Richard Wade-Martins, and Peter Magill at Oxford, Mark Howe at Boston University and Dinos Meletis at the Karolinska Institutet, as well as collaborators Yulong Li at Peking University and Michael Lin at Stanford University.

Striatal immunofluorescence signals for astrocyte marker S100β and neuronal marker NeuN

Sites of early dysfunction in Parkinson's identified

2 October 2020

A new collaborative study from the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre led by Prof Stephanie Cragg and Dr Bradley Roberts has revealed that GABA transporters on astrocytes, the brain's lesser known yet critically important cells, support dopamine release and are sites of early dysfunction in parkinsonism.

Caution when looking at cell recycling in Parkinson’s

4 November 2019

Our Researchers at the Oxford Parkinson’s Disease Centre have shown that cell recycling in Parkinson’s may play a more complex role than previously thought.

New light shed on what controls our motivated actions

20 September 2019

The release of dopamine in the brain plays a key role in determining how we respond when we perceive a potential reward or benefit. But so far little has been understood about the mechanism behind this. A new collaborative paper from Prof Stephanie Cragg's Group and Prof Ed Mann published in Nature Communications has uncovered a dominant regulator of the dynamics of dopamine output.