KI/CBM
11th Distinguished Kavli Lecture - Giacomo Rizzolatti, 15 June 2012
Title: How the actions of others are understood
Friday 15 June - 14:15
Women and Children's Centre
Olav Kyrres St. 11 (Øya)
Auditorium KBA
You see a stranger stub her toe and you immediately flinch in sympathy. You watch a child laugh and can’t help but smile yourself. This ability to instinctively and immediately understand what other people are experiencing and to physically react has long baffled neuroscientists, psychologists,
and philosophers alike, but no more. The fascinating explanation: brain cells called mirror neurons.
Giacomo Rizzolatti was born in Kiev. He studied in Padua where he graduated in Medicine and Neurology. He received his training in physiology at the University of Pisa and in psychology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He has spent most of his scientific career at the University of Parma where he is currently Professor of Human Physiology.The main focus of Rizzolatti’s research concerns the motor system and its role in cognitive functions. His research in the 1980s and 1990s led to the discovery of mirror neurons.
May-Britt Moser elected member of EMBO
May-Britt Moser is recognised by EMBO for her excellence in research.
EMBO elects new members annually on the basis of scientific excellence. The new members represent a broad cross-section of the life sciences. The latest scientists to join the group come from 17 different countries and include 13 female scientists recognized for their contributions to life science research.
Edvard Moser was elected member of EMBO in 2011
Distinguished Kavli Lecture - Professor Oscar Marín and Assistant Professor Beatriz Rico, 1st June 2012
Professor Oscar Marín and Assistant Professor Beatriz Rico will give a lecture on 1 June 2012 at 13:00 and 13:45
Title: Assembly of cortical circuits
Medical-Technical Research Centre (MTFS)
Seminar room, 5th floor
Friday 1 June – 13:00
One of the major goals of neuroscience is to understand how brain function emerges through the assembly of specific neuronal circuits. This is particularly challenging for the cerebral cortex, where dozens, perhaps hundreds of different classes of neurons converge during development to establish specific microcircuits. In simple terms, complex brain circuitries such as those present in the cerebral cortex have evolved as hierarchical networks of excitatory and inhibitory neurons.
In this joint lecture, Oscar Marín will present data on the mechanisms regulating the basic organization of the cerebral cortex. In particular, he will describe a novel mechanism that controls the even distribution of neurons in the developing brain. In the second part of this lecture, Beatriz Rico will summarize recent work on the molecular mechanisms controlling the wiring of specific populations of cortical inhibitory neurons. Specifically, she will describe how schizophrenia susceptibility genes influence the formation of inhibitory synapses, and how abnormal development of these connections disrupts cortical function.
Distinguished Kavli Lecture with Nobel laureate Linda B. Buck on 16 March
Nobel laureate Linda B. Buck will give a lecture on 16 March 2012 at 14:30.
Title: Deconstructing Smell
Women and Children's Centre
Olav Kyrres St. 11 (Øya)
Auditorium KBA
Friday 16 March – 14:30
How do we differentiate thousands of distinct odours and how do our brains perceive and remember them? Humans and other mammals detect as many as 10,000 or more chemicals in the external environment – but how do they actually do it? The brain must also translate the detection of those chemicals into different smells, such as rose or garlic. Finally, pheromones and other social cues elicit hormonal changes and instinctive behaviours in animals. The illumination of the neural circuits underlying these effects may ultimately provide clues to molecular mechanisms that influence basic drives and emotional states in humans.
Linda B. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with her colleague Richard Axel in 2004 for the discovery of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system. Buck used the odour receptor genes to figure out how the identities of different odours are encoded at the molecular level and in the brain to produce the perception of distinct odours. She is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an Affiliate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington.
Prime Minister opened Norwegian Brain Centre
On February 28 the Norwegian Prime Minister; Jens Stoltenberg, officially opened The Norwegian Brain Centre at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The centre is now one of the world's largest brain research laboratories of its kind.
Instead of cutting a ribbon, the Prime Minister connected two cables that illuminated a blue light under the centre's unique cornerstone, which is crystal and contains a reconstruction of a stellate cell of the rat’s entorhinal cortex, which has helped the NTNU researchers unlock the secrets of spatial map formation in the brain.
The 4000 m² facility will continue the research conducted by the university's Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience (KI) / Centre for the Biology of Memory (CBM), where researchers work to measure and understand the electrical activity in large groups of brain cells called neural networks. The centre is a continuation of NTNU's long-term commitment to brain research, with the KI/CBM at the forefront.
The Norwegian Brain Centre will also host selected PhD candidates and researchers from Norway and abroad who need training in the latest technology focused on the brain. The centre will both accommodate and develop the best technology for studying networks in the brain. One of the newest methods, which is under rapid development, involves using virus-based techniques to switch activity in specific neurons on and off, as well as new technology for measuring microscopic signals in the cells.
“With well over 4000 m², our facilities are almost ten times larger than they were, and the standard will be upgraded,” says Edvard Moser, director of the KI/CBM. “Now we are creating a centre that will cover a wide range of methodological approaches to understanding how the networks of the brain function: everything from theoretical studies in physics to microscopic studies of connections between neurons and imaging studies of the brain in action. The brain is such a complex puzzle that many approaches are needed to crack the code.”
New Kavli Institute at the University of Tokyo
Professors May-Britt and Edvard Moser welcome the new member into the Kavli family.
– The Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe is an excellent addition to the group of Kavli Instituttes, and we look forward to meeting them, says director Edvard Moser at The Kavli Institute for systems Neuroscience (KISN) at NTNU in Trondheim.
The Institute, which will now be known as the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), probes the biggest mysteries in modern cosmology: How did the universe begin, and how will it end? What is it made of, and what laws govern its behavior? How did we come to exist?
The Kavli Foundation, based in Southern California, sponsors research in astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience and theoretical physics at institutes across the globe, including China, England, Netherlands, Norway and the United States. Kavli IPMU is The Kavli Foundation’s 16th institute, its sixth in astrophysics and third in theoretical physics, and the first to be established in Japan.
The future practice of science
In the current edition of the journal Science, PhD student Asgeir Kobro-Flatmoen has published a short essay on the future practice of science. The essay is part of an initiative by Science called NextGen Voices, a feature to engage young scientist by asking for short essays on specified topics. A selection of the best responses is published in print. For the current edition the question posed was: How will the practice of science change in your lifetime? What will improve and what new challenges will emerge?
The printed version of the short essay is available here (NB. Log on required)
The online version is available here
Distinguished Kavli Lecture with Professor Michael Hausser on 9 December 2011
Professor Michael Hausser from University College London will hold a lecture on 9th of December 2011 at 14:30
Title: “Dendritic computation.”
Hausser will describe results from experiments combining patch-clamp recordings with two photon imaging and glutamate uncaging that demonstrate how the dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurons can decode spatiotemporal sequences of synaptic inputs, and can implement different temporal coding strategies along single dendrites.
Location: MTFS, CBM/Kavli, seminar room, 5th floor.
The brain's zoom button
Lisa Giocomo and her colleagues at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have discovered a key mechanism that can act like a zoom button in the brain, by controlling the resolution of the brain's internal maps.
In the November 16 edition of Cell, the researchers describe the effect of knocking out HCN1 ion channels in the grid cells of the brain.
Changing the brain's resolution
When the researchers knocked out the ion channels, they found that the resolution of the maps created by the brain became coarser, in that the area covered by each grid cell was larger.
“If grid cells are similar to a longitude and latitude coordinate system, what determines the distance between the coordinate points of this internal map?” Giocomo asks. “When we knocked out the HCN1 ion channel, the scale of the innate coordinate system increased. It's like losing longitude and latitude lines on a map. Suddenly you can't represent a spatial environment at a very fine scale.”
“Report card for the Kavli Institute”: This is undoubtedly Excellent.
The Research Council of Norway (RCN) is given the task by the Ministry of Education
and Research to perform subject-specific evaluations. According to the plan for these
evaluations the RCN carried during 2010 and 2011 out a comprehensive evaluation of
Norwegian research within biology, medicine and health in Norwegian universities,
hospitals, relevant university colleges and relevant research institutes.
Here is their report:
Scientific quality
The Centre for the Biology of Memory (CBM) has developed into one of the world’s
leading arenas for experimental and theoretical studies of memory in brain networks.
Since its inauguration in 2007, CBM has been able to provide some of the most groundbreaking insights so far into how spatial location and spatial memory are computed in the brain and, more generally, how the brain generates its own neural patterns.
The most remarkable contribution was perhaps the discovery of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (in 2005), which immediately pointed to the entorhinal cortex as a hub for the brain
network that makes us find our way through the environment.
The discovery led to a complete revision of established views of how the brain calculates position and how the results of these computations are used by memory networks in the hippocampus. The results will ultimately benefit the development of tools for diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, which commonly begins in just the brain area that contains the grid cells.
The present publication record is indeed excellent with great international impact.
Grade: This is undoubtedly Excellent.
