Emiliana Borrelli
Molecular and cellular neurobiologist; Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at UC Irvine, INSERM research director, and part of the university's Center for Epigenetics and Metabolism. Corresponding and senior author of lewis-borrelli-reward-2021, discovered while ingesting it.
Her career subject is one molecule's signalling: dopamine in health and disease. She generated the first dopamine D2 receptor knockout mouse, and later mice with the receptor deleted only in neurons of specific brain regions. Those animals are the tool a large part of the D2R literature is built on.
That belongs next to the chapter rather than in a separate biography. Much of the D2R evidence lewis-borrelli-reward-2021 reviews — receptor-specific effects on clock genes, the cholinergic-interneuron result, the masking finding — runs back through the mouse line her lab made and, in several citations, through her lab's own papers. This is normal in a review written by specialists, and it is also the reason a review is not an independent audit of its field. The spoke records the same structure elsewhere in a much weaker form: an author summarizing the literature they helped write (anna-lembke, bessel-van-der-kolk). The difference is that here the citations are named and checkable.
Her stated disease interests are Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and pituitary tumours — none of which appear in a chapter called "The Brain's Reward System in Health and Disease." That is good evidence the chapter's scope was set by its volume (Circadian Clock in Brain Health and Disease) rather than by what its senior author knows.
Connections
- author of lewis-borrelli-reward-2021
- affiliation uc-irvine
Related
dopamine · reward-system · advances-in-experimental-medicine-and-biology