Menno Witter project awarded 13,7 million NOK grant

The Norwegian Research Council supports three ERCs Advanced Grants applications. Professor Menno Witter at the Faculty of Medicine, NTNU is behind one of the applications:” The Entorhinal Connectome: A Way to Read the Cortex”. His project will receive 13,7 millon NOK over a four-year period.

The central hypothesis of the funded project is that variations in the architecture of the cortex, particularly in i) intrinsic wiring and ii) input connectivity, result in striking differences in function.

- My current research suggests that the entorhinal cortex provides an optimal cortical network to address this challenge since it is essentially a ‘twin structure' where the siblings, called lateral and medial, have comparable architectures with variations in layer II, but show strikingly different functions, represented by the presence or absence of spatially modulated cells. We have previously shown the existence of grid cells in the medial ‘sibling' and the challence is to explain the absence of such cells in the lateral ‘sibling', says Professor Menno Witter.

Experimentally based rules on why and to what extent architecture causes function, with time, will i) be necessary to efficiently implement biologically inspired computer architectures and ii) significantly enhance the potential to predict the detrimental functional effects of architectural alterations that occur in a number of brain diseases, including dementia.

The unique opportunity offered by the ‘twin approach' will allow establishing causal relationships between the architectures of multi-layered cortices and their functions and eventually lead to a theoretical framework (a set of rules) necessary to make reliable functional inferences on the basis of normal or diseased-altered network architectures.