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SFB 870:  Assembly and Function of Neuronal Circuits in Sensory Processing

Subject Area Medicine
Term from 2010 to 2021
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 118803580
 
Final Report Year 2022

Final Report Abstract

Throughout all three funding periods the overarching goal of the CRC 870 Assembly and Function of Neuronal Circuits was to narrow a fundamental gap in our knowledge of brains and brain function concerning on the one hand biophysical properties of singe cells, synaptic function, synaptic integration or action potential generation and, on the one hand, the complex functions of higher-order neuronal networks and brain structures (behavior, perception etc.). While we have reached a largely mechanistic understanding with respect to the former, it remains rather descriptive and correlational with respect to the latter. The focusing on the structure-function relation of sensory and motor systems framed the overarching conceptual approach to achieve this goal. Both, sensory and motor systems with a known functional significance allow for hypothesis driven scientific approach placing the mechanistic understanding of their development and plasticity as well as the neuronal computations they perform into the center of interest. The CRC’s approach was also intended to counterbalance the increasing number of screening approaches of other consortia. The CRC 870 was organized in three clusters of projects with A-clusters focusing on assembly and plasticity of neural circuits, B-projects on sensory and sensory-motor functions, Z-projects on the development of new experimental tools and their implementation in the consortium. In the course of the funding periods, research on sensorimotor processing, action potential generation and axonal transmission, myelination, reprogramming and regeneration in the circuits under investigation gained attention while in the third funding period, combining bottom-up and top-down approaches, the research focus was extended to include more the dynamics and context dependency of neuronal processing. Thus, many circuits have been described with unprecedented depth, and functional principles have been identified through a close interplay of models based on experimentally collected data and subsequent hypothesis-driven experiments. That this approach has indeed contributed to narrowing and partly even bridging the gap between the above-mentioned levels of observation (basal mechanistic vs. complex descriptive) is evidenced, for example, by new discoveries on the dynamics of sensory processing ("computations") that led to new and hitherto unexpected predictions on perception, which could then be confirmed psychophysically (including humans). The projects used a broad range of model organisms (drosophila, zebra fish, mouse, gerbil, rat, but also humans for psychophysics, as well as genetically manipulated animals), different sensory systems (olfactory, auditory, visual, vestibular pathways), state-of-the-art, and newly developed methods for circuit analysis. The consortium published far more than 300 original publications with more than half of them in highprofile journals.

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