Max Planck Institute for Brain Research

In the reptilian brain, networks for controlling movement determine the sleep rhythm

Tobias Erb and Moritz Helmstaedter are honoured with the most important German research prize

A new study recently published in CELL is reshaping our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the brain, the proteins that are present at synapses.

Max Planck scientist receives the world’s top prize in neuroscience for her pioneering work on molecular mechanisms of brain development and plasticity

This result puts Max Planck in second place in a Europe-wide comparison

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research was founded in Berlin 100 years ago. The first Director was Oskar Vogt, an ambitious scientist who became famous when he investigated Lenin’s brain. His wife Cécile and he provided important findings on the structure of the cerebral cortex – and also labored under a misconception or two.

Our brain is a complex network of nerve cells that communicate with each other through synapses. We are investigating which proteins are used at these synapses and how different nerve cells and synapses differ from each other. Our findings help us to understand the molecular basis of communication in our brain. This communication is essential for all our brain functions and can be disrupted, for example, in neurodegenerative diseases or in old age.

The brain must create an internal model, a so-called ‘cognitive map’, of its environment in order to successfully navigate to a desired destination. Another purpose of this map is to be able to assess the consequences of a decision in a hypothetical environment that we have not yet experienced in the real world. This may be the basis for our creativity and imagination. It is the goal of our research to understand the neural circuits that underlie our inner thought processes.

Our visual ability to separate objects from background depends greatly on detecting local discontinuities of motion, color, contrast or texture. Computing the characteristics of a texture is surprisingly difficult, as confirmed by the hundreds of thousands of trials that neural networks require to “learn” them. Yet our brains segment and differentiate textures without apparent effort. Our research aims to understand how this is done, using cephalopods’s unique ability to camouflage.

The mammalian brain, with its immense number of neurons and extreme density of communication, is the most complex network we know. Methods for partial and sparse analysis of these networks exist for more than a hundred years. However, obtaining locally complete wiring maps of neuronal networks in the mammalian brain only became possible a few years ago. Our research team has now succeeded in mapping brain tissue from the mammalian brain and analyzing it for traces of previous learning processes.

Although learning and memory are tasks performed by our brain on multiple interconnected levels, we can trace them down to chemical reactions leaving molecular footprints. By visualizing these tiny footprints, we aim to build a molecular model of learning. One important factor seems to be the local production of new proteins near the site of information transfer between nerve cells. We have decoded a logistics principle connecting local protein assembly to increase or decrease of information transfer and clarified questions of energy supply for this process.