2020

2020/03/31

Understanding the Formation of Nerve Cell Contacts - Volker Haucke receives 2.5 Million Euros of Funding from the European Research Council (ERC)

Professor Volker Haucke from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) and the Freie Universität Berlin receives a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC). The biochemist is granted a total funding of up to 2.5 million euros for a period of five years for his highly innovative research on the assembly of synapses.

2020/03/31

ERC Advanced Grant awarded to project MatCo

The ECN is delighted to congratulate Prof. Dr. Dr. Friedemann Pulvermüller for receving an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.

2020/03/31

Limbic encephalitis: autoantibodies trigger overexcitation in the brain

A current research project underway at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), in cooperation with the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, suggests that individual antibodies from the cerebrospinal fluid of patients with limbic encephalitis, a certain form of autoimmune encephalitis, increases the excitability of nerve cells. This finding moves us in the direction of a better understanding of the disease. The results have been published in the journal Annals of Neurology* (Ann Neurol 2020; 87: 405-418).

2020/02/24

General Anesthesia Decouples Cortical Pyramidal Neurons

The mystery of general anesthesia is that it specifically suppresses consciousness by disrupting feedback signaling in the brain, even when feedforward signaling and basic neuronal function are left relatively unchanged. The mechanism for such selectiveness is unknown. A team of scientists from Germany (Matthew Larkum & Suzuki Mototaka, Humboldt University of Berlin) showed that three different anesthetics have the same disruptive influence on signaling along apical dendrites in cortical layer 5 pyramidal neurons in mice.

2020/01/20

Scientists Uncover a Never-Before-Seen Type of Signal Occurring in The Human Brain

A team of scientists from Germany (Matthew Larkum, Humboldt University of Berlin) and Greece (Panayiota Poirazi, Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (IMBB-FORTH)) have discovered a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that's not been seen before.