Since 2015 the RU receives funding from the DFG and was recently selected to get another funding period of 36 months with additional 3.19 Mio EUR. Under the leadership of Cluster member Prof. Bartos the RU increased from seven to now nine projects.
"I am proud about our results gained in the first funding period and very thankful for the trust of the reviewer and their further support of our research." said Prof. Bartos. Together with the new member Prof. Diester, two BrainLinks-BrainTools PIs are participating in the renewed RU.
The main aim of the RU is as follows: A fundamental feature of the mammalian brain is its ability to acquire, store and recall novel information, which enables the individual organism to flexibly adapt to its changing environment. Memory formation dependents on the capacity of nerve cells to change the efficacy of their communication points, the synapses. These plastic changes depend on correlated neuronal activity of communicating neurons and are expressed as long-term potentiation (LTP) or the opposite long-term depression (LTD) of synaptic transmission.
Prof. Bartos is head of the project "Mechanisms underlying hippocampal interneuron plasticity and their role in cell assembly formation", whereas Prof. Diester is working on the new topic "The role of parvalbumin positive interneuron activity and plasticity in the prefrontal cortex for movement control." A further new member of the RU is Prof. Sprekeler (TU Berlin) working on the topic "Computional consequences of interneuron plasticity". More information about the RU is available at the website http://www.for2143.uni-freiburg.de/