Alexander Borst
Alexander Borst ( born August 18, 1957 in Bad Neustadt an der Saale ) is director of the division circuits - Information - Models at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Alexander Borst studied biology at the University of Würzburg, where he received his doctorate with a thesis on Studies on the central nervous processing of olfactory stimuli in Drosophila melanogaster in Martin Heisenberg 1984. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and initiated following 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) held before he was appointed in 2001 director of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Since 2011 he is member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and since 2012 a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
Scientific interests
Alexander Borsts work is concerned with the information processing and interconnection of neurons 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 insects, the so-called mushroom bodies play an important role in olfactory learning of the Flies. ( Heisenberg, bristle, Wagner, Byers, J. Neurogenetics 1985)
- That the sodium current caused by voltage-dependent ion channels, frequency-dependent amplification of synaptic signals in motion-sensitive neurons. (Haag & Borst, Nature 1996)
- That the direction of visually perceived movement is based on the so-called Reichardt model. ( Single & Borst, Science 1998)
- That this calculation, similarly to the retina of the vertebrates, carried out in two parallel paths, an ON and an OFF - channel. ( Jösch, Fast, Raghu, Reiff & Borst, Nature 2010)
- That in each of these channels four subgroups of neurons exist, one for each of the four orthogonal directions of motion (left, right, up, down ) are maximally sensitive. This project into four separate layers of nerve tissue, where they are connected with wide price control neurons. ( Maisak et al, Nature 2013)