A new study, co-led by researchers at the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics and funded by  Wellcome will investigate how the human brain develops during adolescence.

Adolescence is marked by major changes in learning, emotions, behaviour and social relationships but surprisingly little is known about how these changes are driven biologically.

The Brain Exploration in Adolescent Minds (BEAM) study is investigating how the human brain develops at a cellular level during one of the most important periods of human growth.

It is funded by Wellcome Trust and co-led by Principal Investigators from CNGG, Professor Derek Jones and Professor Marianne van den Bree, along with Professor Sarah Jayne Blakemore at the University of Cambridge, and Professor Rogier Kievit at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands.

Creating a map of the brain

The BEAM study will follow 350 typically developing young people aged 8 to 14 years old, as well as 100 young people with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, assessing them repeatedly over several years. Over time, researchers will create a detailed map of how the brain's microstructure develops throughout adolescence and examine how these changes relate to learning, social development, emotional functioning and mental health.

In an interview with BBC breakfast, BEAM researcher Dr Jessica Hall explained that hormones do play a part in teenage development, but the brain undergoes some dramatic changes too:

Using world-leading technology at Cardiff University

Using the Connectom scanner at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), researchers will collect one of the most comprehensive datasets on adolescent brain microstructure that exists to date. The scanner is one of only four in the world which is capable of capturing brain images at this extraordinary level of detail.