Emotional resilience is a biological property that makes the difference between taking stress in stride or becoming depressed or anxious in the face of stress, sometimes clinically so. The lab of Olivier Berton, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania and One Mind Rising Star award winner in 2010, has just published a paper in Journal of Neuroscience describing how the HDAC6 gene serves as a governor of brain steroid signals that mediate stress response in emotion-regulating neurons. When Berton’s team deleted HDAC6 in the serotonin neurons of stress-susceptible mice, their resilience was fully restored to normal. Thus, the overexpression of HDAC6 might serve as a biomarker to diagnose susceptibility to depression or anxiety disorders, and its pharmacological suppression might someday provide a remedy for these disorders.

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