Alexander Borst

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Alexander Borst (born August 18, 1957 in Bad Neustadt an der Saale ) is director of the Department of Circuits - Information - Models at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology .

Alexander Borst studied biology at the University of Würzburg , where he received his doctorate from Martin Heisenberg in 1984 with a thesis on investigations into the central nervous processing of olfactory stimuli in Drosophila melanogaster . As a postdoctoral fellow he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and then headed an independent junior research group at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society. He held professorships at the Center for Computational Biology in Bozeman (USA), the University of Tübingen and the University of California, Berkeley (USA) before he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in 2001.

Alexander Borst is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) . His work has been awarded the Research Prize of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) 2014 and the Valentino Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience 2014.

Scientific focus

Alexander Borst's work deals with information processing and the interconnection of nerve cells in the visual center of flies.

Alexander Borst made a number of important discoveries. Among other things, he was able to prove

  • that a certain central brain structure of the insects, the so-called mushroom bodies , play an important role in the olfactory learning of the flies (Heisenberg, Borst, Wagner, Byers, J. Neurogenetics 1985) ,
  • that the current through voltage-dependent sodium ion channels a frequency-dependent amplification of synaptic signals in motion sensitive neurons caused (Hague & Borst, Nature 1996) ,
  • that the direction of visually perceived movement is calculated according to the so-called Reichardt model (Single & Borst, Science 1998) ,
  • that this calculation, similar to the retina of vertebrates, is carried out in two parallel channels, an ON and an OFF channel (Jösch, Schnell, Raghu, Reiff & Borst, Nature 2010) and
  • that in each of these channels there are four subgroups of neurons that are maximally sensitive to one of the four orthogonal directions of movement (right, left, up, down). These project into four separate layers of nerve tissue, where they are connected to large course control neurons (Maisak et al, Nature 2013) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member entry of Alexander Borst (with picture) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on July 3, 2016.
  2. ↑ Member entry by Alexander Borst (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on July 3, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Borst, Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neurobiologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Neustadt an der Saale