19.07.2022
ERC Starting Grant for Philipp Berens
Cluster speaker Philipp Berens has received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his "NextMechMod" project. The project, which aims to develop new models and algorithms for studying amacrine cells, particular nerve cells in the retina of the eye, will be funded with a total of around 1.5 million euros over a period of five years. With the Starting Grants, the ERC provides outstanding young scientists with additional funding in their research careers.
Vision is one of the most important senses for many animals as well as for humans. However, the retina of the eye has not yet been fully explored. The amacrine cells in particular still puzzle researchers. These particular nerve cells are cross-connected with the other nerve cell layers of the retina and form the main class of inhibitory cells. More than 60 types of amacrine cells are currently known from the mouse retina - they differ, for example, in their appearance, function and circuitry. They are particularly challenging for modeling because their activity is difficult to measure and their function can only be inferred from their interconnection in the network.
To better understand their contribution, Philipp Berens and his team are developing a new type of model in their ERC project "Next generation mechanistic models of retinal interneurons"(NextMechMod). In the history of research on information processing in the nervous system, models have traditionally played an important role Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1963 for their biophysical model of ionic currents during excitation and inhibition at the nerve cell membrane, which they presented in 1952. This model, while being very detailed, is difficult to fit to measured data. This is easier for statistical models, but these lack the reference to biological reality.
