Alexander Borst
Alexander Borst (born August 18, 1957 in Bad Neustadt an der Saale) is a German neurobiologist. He is director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology and head of the department Systems and Computational Neurobiology.
Alexander Borst studied biology at the University of Würzburg, where he obtained his PhD as a member of Martin Heisenberg's group. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. Afterwards, he led an Independent Junior Research Group at the Friedrich-Miescher-Laboratory of the Max Planck Society. He was professor the University of California, Berkeley. In 2001, he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
[edit] Scientific focus
Alexander Borst's scientific research is focused on the foundations of information processing and neural circuits in the fly brain. Alexander Borst's work led to a number of scientific findings. Among these were the discoveries that
- a specific structure of the insect brain, the mushroom bodies, play an important role in the olfactory learning processes of flies.[1]
- voltage sensitive ion channels lead to a frequency-dependent amplification of synaptic signals in motion-sensitive neurons. (Haag & Borst, Nature 1996)
- the direction of visually perceived movement is calculated following the so-called Reichardt-Model. (Single & Borst, Science 1998)
- the fly brain splits up visual information into ON and OFF-channels, similar to bipolar cells in the retina of vertebrate eyes. (Jösch, Schnell, Raghu, Reiff & Borst, Nature 2010)
[edit] References
- ^ Heisenberg, M. and Borst, A. and Wagner, S. and Byers, D. (1985). "Drosophila Mushroom Body Mutants are Deficient in Olfactory Learning". Journal of Neurogenetics (Informa Healthcare) 2 (1): 1–30. doi:10.3109/01677068509100140. PMID 4020527. http://www.informaworld.com/index/787548922.pdf.
