2020

Using post-mortem tissue samples, a team of researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have studied the mechanisms by which the novel coronavirus can reach the brains of patients with COVID-19, and how the immune system responds to the virus once it does. The results, which show that SARS-CoV-2 enters the brain via nerve cells in the olfactory mucosa, have been published in Nature Neuroscience*. For the first time, researchers have been able to produce electron microscope images of intact coronavirus particles inside the olfactory mucosa.

It appears that autophagy protects our neurons in the brain, but evidently for entirely different reasons than previously assumed, as researchers from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) and Charité in Berlin have now shown. These fundamentally new findings have now been published in the prestigious journal “Neuron”.

Ten days of research, innovation and international exchange - Berlin Science Week and Falling Walls invite you to a Remote World Science Summit this year. With more than 200 virtual discussion events, workshops, exhibitions and performances, the organizers defy the pandemic and want to promote a deeper understanding of the world. Neuroscientists will discuss, for example, how to deal with dementia.

MDC researchers received a $150,000 pilot project grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Neurodegeneration Challenge Network to investigate a defining feature of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

ECN’s booth at the “Research in Germany” virtual career fair this year saw nearly 500 visitors. The chatroom was fully booked for every minute of the four-hour event as dozens of students expressed interest in the program and asked questions about the curriculum, lab rotations, and the application process and requirements.

Cellular waste disposal, where autophagy and lysosomes interact, performs elementary functions, such as degrading damaged protein molecules, which impair cellular function, and reintroducing the resulting building blocks such as amino acids into the metabolic system. This recycling process is known to keep cells young and, for instance, protects against protein aggregation, which occurs in neurodegenerative diseases. But what, apart from starvation, actually gets this important system going?

Though academic institutions have contributed enormously to the remarkable growth in the healthcare industry, a key limiting resource for this continued growth is the creation of career opportunities for doctoral graduates.

This year everything is different: Due to the Corona crisis, the Long Night of Sciences 2020 has also been cancelled. Nevertheless, the Long Night of Sciences 2020 has taken place on the radio.

Gero Miesenböck, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel receive the 2020 Prize in Life Science & Medicine!

A research group led by Professor Dietmar Schmitz of Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin has pinpointed the area of the brain involved in transferring memory-associated information into long-term memory. The results have now been published in Nature Communications*.

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

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.