PI: Lukas Groschner
Focus: We study how the nervous system processes signals and produces meaningful behavior. Inspired by molecular biology and biochemistry, we take a mechanistic approach to circuit neuroscience: Like a geneticist who tests gene function by knockout and reconstitution, we test neural circuits by manipulating them in a targeted fashion in the living organism. We use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model in which numerical simplicity, well-charted connectivity, and our ability to control nervous activity have aligned to make mechanistic ideas precise and testable. In our research, we rely on a broad repertoire of techniques, which include optogenetics, in vivo patch clamp experiments, electron- and multi-photon microscopy, computational modelling and behavioral analyses. Bridging cellular biophysics and animal behavior, we seek to reveal the beautiful and intricate complexity of neural circuits. We dismantle them piece by piece and gain insight in the reconstruction.
Network: Just like neurons, we do not act in isolation, but in a network of scientists. We collaborate with—and draw inspiration from—Alexander Borst and Lisa Fenk (Max Planck Institute of Biological Intelligence), Gero Miesenböck (University of Oxford), Maximilian Jösch (Institute of Science and Technology Austria), Salil Bidaye (Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience), Roland Malli, Gerd Leitinger (Gottfried Schatz Research Center) and many more.
