Recognition, expansion and change

“2007 has been marked by recognition, expansion and change. The most important event is clearly that the centre became the 15th Kavli Institute in the world, which has involved quite a bit of recognition. Another important event has been the expansion of the permanent scientific staff, and we’ve also gone through with some important realignments”, say May-Britt and Edvard Moser.

“The designation of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience is the most prominent recognition we have received to date. Most of the Kavli Institutes are at prestigeous universities in the United States, such as Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, Yale, Caltech and MIT. We are the third Kavli Institute in Europe, along with the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge”, emphasizes CBM director Edvard Moser.
“It’s also been important for us that the permanent scientific staff expanded in 2007, with the hiring of Professor Menno Witter, who has now moved permanently to Trondheim. We have worked closely with him for several years, but the move means that our work will be that much more integrated. Witter is already working at full speed to build up a first-class and modern neuroanatomy laboratory,” adds director May-Britt Moser. “The different groups at the centre complement each other quite well, and now we can work at a more in-depth level, and make important progress, while at the same time we’ve expanded our scientific breadth, and are a stronger specialist group.”

A number of CBM’s researchers have been awarded important honours and awards in recent years, which is a source of pride and optimism. “It’s not just the enormous recognition that came from the centre being the only one in Norway that was awarded start-up funding from the European Research Centre (ERC), as a result of Stefan Leutgeb’s project application. It’s also that, by hiring Witter, we’re laying the foundation to build bridges between basic research and clinical applied knowledge. Both Stefan and Menno represent knowledge and research that will contribute to making it easier in the future to diagnose and treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and other illnesses”, predicts Edvard Moser.

The midterm evaluation of the CBM as a Norwegian Centre of Excellence gave the centre top marks. “Now we’re halfway, and after five years it’s natural to think about the time that has passed, and the next five years”, muses May-Britt Moser. “The first five years have been marked by the development of our research group. We took as our starting point the mechanisms for memory in the hippocampus. We began to realize early on that a sense of location couldn’t just be the result of processes that take place in the hippocampus, so we therefore branched out into nearby cortical areas. We had to expand into the surrounding cortex, and in the entorhinal cortex we found a central part of the brain’s spatial locater, namely a person’s ability to figure out where he or she is located. That radically transformed our work. In the course of the first five years we’ve consequently made a discovery that has not only transformed our own work, but also the entire field. The understanding of place representation in the brain today is quite different than it was just a few years ago, because of the research that’s taken place here at the centre,” she emphasizes.

The centre’s goal has consequently expanded and changed over the years. “With regards to the next five years, we now want to use the discoveries we’ve made to help in understanding the brain as a whole. To understand the workings of the neural network in general, we’re using memory and spatial location as a starting point. The goal is that in coming decades, we use this knowledge to dedicate ourselves to also understand other cognitive functions, such as decision making and social interactions, because these abilities probably have a great deal to do with the brain’s basic mechanisms. When all is said and done we want to understand things such as abstract thought and creativity”, explain the two CBM directors.

“The reason that we now can do this is that the mechanism for spatial location that we found, the grid cells, are easy to locate in the brain and have characteristics that are reliable and easy to measure. That means that we can use them as a gateway in understanding the general principles by which the neural network operates. Another important factor is that this is a phenomenon that is produced in the brain itself. In most of our sensory systems, you’ll see changes in the signals that come in from the outside, and that are a reflection of the surroundings. These are adapted in the brain, while in grid cells, it is first and foremost “homemade” signals that are produced and adapted by the brain. That means that spatial location is a good model for examining how the brain works”, explains Edvard Moser.

CBM researchers plan to use this model to understand complicated thought processes in the brain. “We’ll do that in two different ways. The first is to take advantage of innovations in gene technology, to get a better handle on causal processes. The centre has now set up a virus laboratory where we will use harmless viruses to deliver genes to selected cell groups in the brain. By inserting genes into the target cells, these “delivery” viruses enable us to turn the cells on and off as we like. By turning cells on and off, we can find out which cell types have which functions.

The other approach we’ll take is to use statistical analyses and modelling of activity in a large network. The data we get from research are so wide-ranging and variable that we will do well by running them through a computer model to understand what is possible and what is not in specific neural networks”, the researchers say.

CBM is a centre that is now pursuing a variety of directions, in as much as its various research efforts have grown. “Our fundamental focus is still on basic research. We will use memory and sense of location as a gateway to understand how the brain functions; that is the core of our work: we want to understand the normal processes in the brain. Nevertheless, our focus has been expanded to also include pathological conditions. Because the centre has more researchers, it means that it’s possible for us to study more of the brain, such as the structure, as is being done by Menno Witter, and function and behaviour, as Stefan Leutgeb has begun to do”, points out May-Britt Moser.

“Our research and findings have now come to the point where it’s appropriate to build a bridge to clinical work. That won’t change our basic approach to understanding the normal nervous system, but at the same time we’re doing this to generate knowledge that will have more immediate applications. When basic research has clear consequences, it becomes our civic responsibility to work with applications based on what we have found out. That is a central element in Stefan Leutgeb’s ERC proposal, which looks at what goes wrong in the brain as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, for example. Additionally, Menno Witter is working with a research group at NTNU that wants to understand normal processes and pathological processes, such as are found in Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy”, she adds.

“We would like to do our part to enhance the overall level of knowledge in the field, so we’re particularly pleased to be able to arrange the Fridtjof Nansen conference on Neural Networks and Behaviour in June 2008. We’ll bring together some of the best researchers working at the nexus of their various disciplines and neurosciences. There’s been a great deal of interest in the conference already, and we have selected and invited top-shelf researchers. These kinds of conferences can contribute to lifting our overall understanding of the field. The best researchers from physiology, mathematics, physics, medicine and psychology whose focus is on neural processes will be gathered in a place where they won’t only remember the conference because of its content, but because the location is so unique that their memories of the experience won’t compete with other memories” says Edvard Moser, with a twinkle in his eye.

“This discipline is developing so quickly now that if a researcher wants to be involved with the next advances and change the field by contributing new knowledge, you have to do what you can to find ways to guarantee that you’re asking the right questions. We also have to work on developing theories and models that explain why things work together the way they do. We have gotten a few laurels in 2007, but we’re not going to rest on them. We don’t have time!” say Edvard and May-Britt Moser.

Hege Tunstad, Feb. 2008