Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence (Martinsried site)

With twelve Synergy Grants, the Max Planck Society claims top spot in the ERC ranking

Chickens provide important insights into its complex mode of action

New study reveals surprising female influence on song learning in zebra finches

Their first vocalizations help young zebra finch males to memorize the songs of adults

A brain circuit inhibits food intake during nausea

A zebrafish larva that is only a few days old isn’t yet very mobile: at this age, it is capable of a few vigorous tail movements and not much else. For Herwig Baier at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, however, that’s enough. For him, a simple and, above all, transparent brain is much more important. His particular aim is to switch individual neurons on and off using light and thus discover how the brain controls movement and behavior.

In the early days, only a small path connected the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried with the outskirts of Munich. Now a huge biocampus is located on the periphery of Munich, and the path has been transformed into a wide road. According to Tobias Bonhoefffer, learning and memory function in a very similar way: intensively used pathways are expanded, while unimportant routes and dead ends are eliminated.

We do not always perceive odors in the same way. Instead, our perception is modulated by previous experiences, context and internal states such as hunger or stress, which also modulates the behavioral response. Our research group investigates what happens in the brain during this process, using the zebrafish as a model. In the transparent brains of the animals, we are able to investigate how sensory, associative and motor circuits interact to produce odor-controlled behavior.

Depression is a disorder that affects thoughts, but also the ability to engage in the most basic actions, as simple as getting out of bed. Therefore, this disorder must perturb a core network of brain regions implicated in our motivation to act. Our team at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology investigates in mice what part of the brain is active when they spontaneously engage in an action, using a novel method to record whole-brain activity. The goal is to better understand what brain circuits controls our drive to act and how they become dysfunctional in psychiatric disorders.

Neurodegenerative diseases are devastating disorders for which no cure currently exists. The molecular mechanisms of these diseases are still not well understood. A characteristic feature of neurodegeneration is the accumulation of protein aggregates in the brain. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology investigate the effects of aggregates on nerve cells, using histological and biochemical methods, behavioral tests and in vivo microscopy. The aim of these studies is to gain a deeper understanding of how diseases develop, in order to develop better treatments in the future.

As soon as we open our eyes and look around, we immediately realize where we are, which objects surround us, and in which direction they are moving. All this information is contained within the images that our e eyes deliver to our brain, but only implicitly: to extract it in an explicit way, our brain has to compute. But how do nerve cells compute? Using motion vision in the fruit fly Drosophila as an example for neural computation, we were able to answer this question in large parts within recent years. 

The mammalian brain consists of hundreds of cell populations that all carry the same genetic information in the cell nucleus. How do neurons become specified as one differentiated subtype versus another? The ganglionic eminences (GE) are embryonic brain structures that produce many GABAergic cell types which disperse widely throughout the brain. We use single-cell RNA sequencing to profile the transcriptomes of developing neurons, in combination with genetic fate mapping techniques. Our findings shed new light on the molecular diversification of precursor cells.