Spanish Neuroscience in Focus: Highlights From the SENC 2025 Meeting

Abstract

The biennial meeting of the Spanish Society for Neuroscience has long served as a meeting point for a diverse, creative and internationally connected neuroscience community. The 20th Meeting of the Spanish Society for Neuroscience, held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in September 2025, offered a particularly vivid illustration of this breadth. Across symposia, plenary lectures, poster sessions and informal discussions, the meeting brought together researchers working at multiple levels of analysis, from molecular mechanisms and cellular identities to neural circuits, behaviour, cognition and neurological disease. This Special Issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience was conceived as an opportunity to capture part of that scientific energy and to give broader visibility to the neuroscience currently being developed in Spain.

The contributions collected here originate from organizers and speakers of symposia held during the SENC meeting. Rather than attempting to provide an exhaustive overview of the meeting, the Special Issue offers a selective snapshot of themes that are central to contemporary neuroscience and strongly represented within the Spanish research community. These include the mechanisms by which neural cell states are established and maintained, how immune and glial processes shape brain function and disease, how neural circuits support cognition and behaviour and how mechanistic insights can inform our understanding of neurological disorders.

A first set of contributions addresses how neural cells acquire, maintain or alter their identities in development, adulthood and disease. Bizzotto and colleagues discuss current approaches to cell fate in human neurodevelopment and disease, a field transformed by the convergence of human genetics, single-cell technologies, organoid systems and comparative developmental analyses. Together, these approaches are reshaping our understanding of how human neural diversity emerges, how developmental trajectories can be perturbed and how disease-relevant cellular phenotypes can be modelled in experimentally accessible systems. Complementing this developmental perspective, Fariñas and colleagues focus on quiescence as an active and dynamic regulator of adult neural stem cells. Their review highlights a major conceptual shift in the field: Quiescence is no longer viewed as a passive dormant state, but as a regulated condition that preserves stem cell potential while allowing context-dependent transitions into activation, differentiation or return to dormancy. This perspective is particularly relevant for understanding tissue maintenance, ageing and regenerative capacity in the adult nervous system.

A second theme emerging from the issue concerns the central role of glial and immune mechanisms in neurological disease. De Santis and colleagues examine multiscale approaches to understanding the complex role of microglia in Alzheimer's disease. By integrating information across molecular, cellular, circuit and systems levels, the review illustrates why microglia cannot be interpreted simply as detrimental or protective, but rather as dynamic responders whose actions depend on disease stage, local environment and interaction with other neural and nonneural cell types. Parra-Damas and colleagues further explore Alzheimer's disease from the perspective of parvalbumin interneuron vulnerability and excitation–inhibition imbalance. Their contribution underscores how selective alterations in inhibitory circuits may contribute to network dysfunction, cognitive impairment and disease progression. Together, these articles emphasize that neurodegenerative disease should be understood not only as a problem of neuronal loss but also as a disorder of multicellular interactions and circuit homeostasis.

The interface between neuroscience, immunology and clinical neurology is also represented by the article by Dalmau and colleagues on antibody-mediated mechanisms in autoimmune neurological disorders. This contribution highlights how the identification of pathogenic antibodies has transformed the diagnosis and conceptual understanding of a growing group of neurological diseases. These disorders provide powerful examples of how molecularly defined immune mechanisms can lead to specific disturbances in synaptic, cellular and circuit function, often with direct therapeutic implications. In this sense, autoimmune neurology exemplifies the value of mechanistic bridges between basic neuroscience and clinical practice.

A third group of articles explores how the brain extracts structure from experience and uses that structure to guide behaviour. Torres-Pérez and colleagues address the neural substrates of ‘number sense’ from the combined perspectives of genetics, behaviour and neural circuitry. Number sense is a fundamental cognitive capacity with deep evolutionary roots, and its study requires integration across species, methods and levels of explanation. By bringing together genetic, behavioural and circuit-level evidence, this review illustrates how cognitive functions can be dissected through convergent experimental strategies.

Soria-Gómez and colleagues examine learning from negative outcomes in ‘The Disappointment Dilemma’, considering both short- and long-term consequences of unexpected or unfavourable events. This topic resonates broadly across behavioural neuroscience, affective neuroscience and psychiatry, because the ability to update expectations after negative outcomes is essential for adaptive behaviour, whereas maladaptive processing of such outcomes may contribute to vulnerability in mental disorders. Tabas and colleagues, in turn, discuss statistical learning from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. Their article places emphasis on how the brain identifies regularities in a complex sensory world, integrating incoming information with prior knowledge, expectations and internal models. Together, these contributions illustrate the richness of current cognitive neuroscience in Spain, spanning numerical cognition, learning, prediction and adaptive behaviour.

Although the articles in this Special Issue cover different topics and methodological traditions, they are connected by common themes. The first is the need to understand the nervous system across scales. The same issue brings together stem cell quiescence, human neurodevelopment, microglial biology, inhibitory circuit vulnerability, antibody-mediated disease, number sense, disappointment learning and statistical learning. This diversity is not a weakness but a defining feature of neuroscience. Progress often emerges precisely from the ability to connect mechanisms across levels: from genes to cells, from cells to circuits, from circuits to behaviour and from behaviour to disease.

A second shared theme is the increasingly blurred boundary between basic and translational neuroscience. Studies of adult neural stem cells inform questions about ageing and regeneration. Work on human neurodevelopment provides entry points into neurodevelopmental disease. Research on microglia, interneurons and immune mechanisms reshapes our understanding of Alzheimer's disease and autoimmune neurological disorders. Cognitive studies of learning, expectation and numerical processing contribute to broader models of adaptive and maladaptive behaviour. The articles gathered here therefore reflect a community in which fundamental questions and clinically relevant problems are not separate enterprises, but mutually reinforcing dimensions of the same scientific effort.

Finally, this Special Issue reflects the strength of a scientific community that is both locally rooted and internationally engaged. The Spanish Society for Neuroscience plays a central role in bringing together researchers across institutions, disciplines and generations. The ‘Las Palmas meeting’ offered an opportunity not only to present new data, but also to build connections, stimulate collaborations and showcase the intellectual vitality of neuroscience in Spain. Publishing this Special Issue in the European Journal of Neuroscience extends that visibility to a wider international readership and reinforces the journal's commitment to serving the European and global neuroscience community.

As Senior Editors of EJN and guest editors of this Special Issue, we are grateful to all authors for their thoughtful contributions, to the reviewers for their careful and constructive evaluations and to the editorial and production teams for their support. We also thank the Spanish Society for Neuroscience and the organizers of the SENC meeting for creating the scientific context from which this collection emerged. Beyond the scientific programme itself, meetings such as SENC play an essential role in fostering the intellectual and collaborative environment in which neuroscience advances. They bring together researchers across career stages, disciplines and institutions, enabling new collaborations, supporting early-career scientists and allowing ideas to develop beyond individual laboratories. This role is particularly important as neuroscience increasingly depends on interdisciplinary approaches, international partnerships and open exchange of knowledge. We thus hope that this Special Issue will not only highlight excellent work presented at the meeting but also encourage new collaborations, inspire future generations of neuroscientists and further strengthen the international visibility of Spanish neuroscience. Ultimately, the enduring value of scientific meetings lies not only in the discoveries they showcase but also in the scientific communities they help to build and the future directions they help to shape.

Eloísa Herrera: writing – original draft. Paola Bovolenta: writing – review and editing. Carlos Matute: writing – review and editing.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.