FENS Regional Meeting in Pécs

Plenary speakers:

Thomas SÜDHOF (Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2013 for the “discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”,Stanford University Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA) “Towards a molecular logic of neural circuits"  

Thomas C. Südhof is a German American neuroscientist who discovered key molecular components and mechanisms that form the basis of chemical signaling in neurons. His findings helped scientists to better understand the cellular mechanisms underlying neurological conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. For his breakthroughs, Südhof was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Südhof received the 2010 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (with Rothman) and the 2013 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Throughout his career much of Südhof’s research focused on presynaptic neurons, which release neurotransmitters into the synapse between communicating cells. He elucidated the process by which synaptic vesicles, which are filled with neurotransmitters, fuse with neuronal membranes and undergo exocytosis, in which they release their neurotransmitters into the extracellular environment. He found that specific interactions between proteins, such as between Munc18-1 and SNARE proteins, as well as a molecular complex based on the proteins RIM and Munc13, are required for synaptic vesicle fusion.

Hannah MONYER (University of Heidelberg, Germany) ”Short- and long-range inhibitory neurones governing spatial representation and memory"

Hannah Monyer studied Medicine at the University of Heidelberg and obtained her MD degree in 1982. 1983–1986 she worked as a resident at the Dept. of Child Psychiatry of the University of Mannheim and at the Dept. of Pediatric Neurology at the University of Lübeck. She started her scientific career as a neurobiologist with Prof. Barry Tharp and Prof. Dennis Choi at Stanford University, California. In 1989 she returned to Heidelberg for a second postdoctoral period at the ZMBH with Prof. Peter Seeburg. She habilitated in Biochemistry in 1993. Since 1994 she has been an independent group leader, first as a junior professor and since 1999 heading the Department Clinical Neurobiology at Heidelberg University Hospital. In 2004 she was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the DFG. In 2009 she was appointed W3 Helmholtz Professor at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) Heidelberg. Her research group "Clinical Neurobiology" is a cooperational division of the Medical Faculty of the University and the DKFZ Heidelberg. Hannah Monyer's major scientific interests focus on mechanisms related to learning and memory. Her projects include investigations on the role of glutamate receptors in synaptic plasticity, the function of GABAergic interneurons underlying synchronous activity and memory and finally, the contribution of postnatally generated neurons for brain plasticity.

Anders BJÖRKLUND (Neuroscience Center, University of Lund, Sweden ) „Use of embryonic stem cells for dopamine cell replacement in Parkinson´s Disease"

Anders Björklund applied and was invited to join the medical school at the University of Lund, where he would stay for his entire career. Although to this day, Björklund remains interested in finding successful techniques for transplanting dopaminergic cells into Parkinson patients, he believes that there is promise for finding completely new – and perhaps more successful – therapies by investigating the usefulness of neurotrophic factors and better understanding the underlying cause of Parkinson disease. His research has been concerned with reparative and neuroprotective mechanisms in the CNS using cell replacement and gene transfer techniques. His group was early in the study of neural tissue transplants, and in the 1970’s they pioneered the development of methods for cell transplantation to the mammalian brain and spinal cord. Their most important contributions during this dynamic period included studies on the survival, integration and functional connectivity of fetal neuroblasts grafted to the CNS of adult rats, functional cell replacement in rodent models of Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease, and in animal models of hippocampal damage and cognitive decline. They have been one of the leading groups in the exploration of GDNF and its neuroprotective and regenerative properties in the nigro-striatal dopamine system and in the forefront of research aimed at developing recombinant AAV and lentiviral vectors for neuroprotective and restorative therapy in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Akihiro KUSUMI (Kyoto University, Japan) "Single-molecule view of the plasma membrane organization for signal transduction"

Akihiro Kusumi has studied in Kyoto, where he returned to work in 2005. He proposed an explanation for reduced diffusion speed of lipid and protein molecules in the cell membrane, based on a model of hop diffusion in which lipids are confined to a reduced space, created by a membrane-skeleton-induced compartments. These compartments allow the lipids or proteins freely in a limited region and limiting also the diffusion to other parts of the membrane. Getting to a new compartment is called "hop diffusion" while diffusion in the compartment is allowed by Brownian movement, the compartments of the cell are responsible of the reduced diffusion speed of the lipid or proteins when compared to artificial vesicles. His love of biological membranes, particularly in the neuronal network, was accidentally initiated when he, a senior majoring in physics at that time, entered a wrong lecture room where Prof. Shun-ichi Ohnishi of Kyoto University happened to be lecturing about the Singer-Nicolson’s fluid mosaic model in his membrane course in 1974. Prof. Ohnishi became his PhD advisor, with whom he studied the rotational diffusion of rhodopsin in reconstituted membranes. He did his first postdoc with Prof. Jim Hyde of the Medical College of Wisconsin, who is responsible for his experimental physics (nonlinear EPR of membranes, 1980-2). He did his second postdoc with Prof. Malcolm Steinberg (Princeton University, 1982-4), who is responsible for his cellular and developmental biology.

Attila LOSONCZY (Columbia University Medical Center, USA) "Imaging hippocampal circuits for navigation and memory"

Attila Losonczy received the MD degree from the Medical School, University of Pécs in 1999, and has been a member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science since 2010. In 2011, Losonczy was named a Searle Scholar. In 2013, he was awarded the NARSAD Young Investigator Award. Losonczy was awarded the BRAIN Initiative Award by the National Institute of Health in two consecutive years, 2014 and 2015. Attila’s research program is aimed at understanding how mammalian cortical circuits mediate learning and formation of declarative memories – our repository of acquired information of people, places, objects and events. His laboratory uses functional imaging, electrophysiology, behavioral analysis, manipulation, and computational modeling to dissect the functional role of hippocampal excitatory, inhibitory and modulatory neural circuits in mnemonic functions. Subsequent work – combining in vivo functional imaging and perturbations of genetically-specified neurons during behavior – has redefined our understanding of hippocampal circuit function. For instance, they characterized the type of information carried by subcortical inputs to the hippocampus at a single synapse-level (Kaifosh et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2013), and they dissected the roles of hippocampal inhibitory circuits in navigation and learning (Lovett-Barron et al., Science, 2014, Lee et al. Neuron, 2014; Basu et al., Science 2016).

István MÓDY (UCLA BRAIN Research Institute, USA) "Interneurons in Alzheimer’s disease"

István Módy, Ph.D. is the Tony Coelho Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Distinguished Professor of Physiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and he also holds a part-time W3 Professorship in the Department of Epileptology, of the Bonn University Medical Center. He is a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Michael Prize for Epilepsy, the American Epilepsy Society’s Basic Scientist Award, the Hauptmann Prize, among others. Over the years, GABAergic inhibition in the brain has become the principal research focus of the Módy lab. He made some seminal discoveries in the field of epilepsy research including the demonstration that there are more synaptic GABAA receptors on epileptic neurons, but that the molecular composition of these receptors is different from those found in the non-epileptic brain. More recently, in a publication about the role of tonic inhibition following stroke, he demonstrated that an elevated level of this type of GABAergic tone hinders functional recovery after stroke in a mouse model of the disease. During the past few years, Prof. Módy’s lab has started addressing the hormonal control of neuronal excitability in females. His lab presently is working on alterations of GABAergic inhibition in mouse models of Alzheimer’s Disease, and reproductive depression models.

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