Research into how nerve cells regulate communication receives ERC grant

How does our nervous system process information, enables us to perform adequate reactions, and store information to enhance our performance? How can it keep adjusting to the ever-changing world around us?

Scoring the decisive goal at a soccer match, remembering the name of the person just introduced to us at a party, or learning another language: These are examples of what neural processing achieves.

All neural processing requires plastic changes of the transmission of signals across the synapses that connect nerve cells.

This is very important when it comes to the generation of activity patterns for example to generate coordinated movement, but also to store information for learning and memory

This is called synaptic plasticity. It is essential to life and is a rescue mechanism to restore function when the nervous system is challenged.

Now Associate Professor at Department of Neuroscience Alexander Matthias Walter has received a EUR 2 million ERC Consolidator Grant for further research in this area. This is the first time a researcher at the Department of Neuroscience receives an ERC Consolidator Grant.

“I am very happy to receive the grant as it will allow us to uncover principles of a novel plasticity mechanism which may very well operate at all synapses that release neurotransmitters,” says Alexander Matthias Walter.

This synaptic plasticity relates to the ability of synapses to increase or decrease the amount of transmitter that is released from a synapse, leading to an enhanced or diminished response in the connected cell.

“This is very important when it comes to the generation of activity patterns for example to generate coordinated movement, but also to store information for learning and memory. Besides, the inability to properly adjust synaptic transmission may be directly related to several neurological disorders like epilepsy and intellectual disability”, explains Alexander Matthias Walter.

Small sites with large effect

At all synapses that signal via neurotransmitters there are special locations where communication begins, called release sites.

“But there are typically just very few such sites per synaptic contact, so how strong the transmitted signal is greatly depends on the number of active sites. This is why the sites are very important for synaptic plasticity,” says Alexander Matthias Walter and continues:

“We recently characterized which proteins form these sites and found evidence that the sites are regulated to adjust synaptic transmission across all of the timescales on which neural processing happens: from milliseconds up until the lifetime of an animal.”

With the ERC funding Alexander Matthias Walter and his colleagues will now uncover basic principles of this novel type of synaptic plasticity using fruit flies.

“Because the principal composition and function of synapses are largely conserved, we hope that our discoveries will hold relevance, also for the human nervous system. In fact, we will study human disease mutations using flies to understand whether some neurological problems develop due to the inability of the patients’ release sites to properly engage this plasticity”, says Alexander Matthias Walter.

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