Marie Curie Actions: Inspiring Researchers - Imdea

the ageing population. Current treatments involve the surgicalimplantation of light-sensing arrays.fl uorescent colours that could trace how individual circuits driftapart, come together again, and where they ended up in the brain.In collaboration with theoretical physicist Rava Azeredo da Silveiraof the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique of the École NormaleSupérieure in Paris, another FMI team led by Dr Roska gained basicinsights into the workings of retinal circuits. They identifi ed a new neuralcircuit in the retina that responds specifi cally to approaching objects.Typically, neurons are thought to perform one specifi c task. But theneuron in particular bipolar cells that detects approaching objectsduring the day also performs an entirely different function at night.The neural circuit identifi ed by Dr Roska and his team is alsoresponsible, via other photoreceptors, for night vision. The teamdemonstrated that a circuit of neurons is able to perform multiplefunctions when subjected to specifi c physiological conditions.Marching ahead with nanomachinesA third team in Dr Roska’s lab collaborated with a group led byDr Zsolt Boldogkői of the University of Szeged, Hungary. Togetherthey engineered living nanomachines – trans-synaptic virusesthat could leap from one neuron to the next in the brain andperform operations. For example, these viruses created proteinswhich coloured the nerves yellow for an active circuit and bluefor an inactive circuit. Next, the team developed a wide range ofSuch techniques enable researchers to better understand thedynamic mechanisms involved in how neural circuits computeparticular brain functions.‘With these new techniques we can start to tackle questions thatso far were beyond our means,’ says Dr Roska. ‘We can nownot only understand what happens in the brain after a particularstimulus, but for the fi rst time we can also ask how neural circuitscompute particular brain functions.’‘We still have one more year left from the grant period. Afterthat, I plan to continue the research direction I have started,’concludes Dr Roska.Project acronymNeural CircuitFull project titleNeural Circuit: combining genetic, physiological and viraltracing methods to understand the structure and function of neural circuitsType of grantExcellence TeamBudgetEUR 1.84 millionDuration of project01-11-2006 - 31-10-2010Scientific disciplineLife sciencesHost institutionDr Botond RoksaNovartis Forschungsstiftung ZweigniederlassungFriedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical ResearchNeural Circuit LaboratoryMaulbeerstrasse 664058 Basel - SwitzerlandTel. +41 616 978575 // Fax +41 616 973976283