Levelt, Kole and Lohmann group receive NWO grant

The NWO Domain Board Science has awarded three applications from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in the Open Competition Domain Science – M. We would like to congratulate the Levelt lab, Kole lab and Lohmann lab on receiving the grant.

ENW-M grants are intended for curiosity-driven scientific research with impact. The ENW-M grants offer researchers the opportunity and freedom to strengthen excellent, challenging and innovative lines of research, both mono disciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. The awarded promising research projects from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience are highlighted below.

Levelt & Kole lab

Our brains are extremely efficient in interpreting highly complex visual information. An influential concept of how the brain achieves this is predictive coding in which the brain compares an internal model of the environment with visual inputs it receives. It minimizes the difference between the two by calculating errors in the prediction and using these to update the internal model. In this grant we aim to understand the role of specific subsets of inhibitory neurons in the visual cortex in calculating prediction errors and we examine the contribution of axonal plasticity.

Lohmann lab

The provision of energy is a major determinant of neuronal function. It is therefore not surprising that failure to achieve sufficient energy provision and perturbed mitochondrial motility have been linked to neurodevelopmental and -degenerative diseases. In this new project we ask whether successful mitochondrial capture allows synapses to stabilize and strengthen. Our experiments will establish an important link between the energy logistics of developing neurons and how they wire up the brain’s neuronal circuits. This is also relevant to our understanding of neurodevelopmental disorders that are frequently associated with synaptic miswiring and insufficient energy metabolism.

Keep an eye on our website for further developments within these projects.