Completed Brain & Nervous System Cells, Biochemistry & Physiology

Selective targeting of synapses to specific dendritic locations and their modulation by voltage-gated channels

Funder MRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation School of Pharmacy
Funding £1.5M
Period May 2011 — May 2014

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every second, thousands of electrical signals arrive at a single brain cell, and that cell must decide what to do with them—this project asks how it manages that feat. The neocortex, the brain’s outer layer, has expanded enormously in humans, enabling perception, memory, and decision-making. But each neuron is not a simple wire; it is a complex structure with many compartments that receive and process information differently. How these compartments interact to transform a flood of incoming signals into a single output remains poorly understood. This gap matters because when these processes go wrong, they contribute to neurological diseases such as epilepsy—sometimes as a cause, sometimes as the brain’s response to injury. This is fundamental science. The researchers will map how synapses target specific dendritic locations and how voltage-gated channels modulate those connections. There is no immediate practical application. But understanding the basic logic of neuronal computation could, over time, reveal why certain brain circuits become hyperexcitable in epilepsy, pointing toward more targeted interventions. Past fundamental work on neuronal signalling, for instance, underpinned every modern anti-seizure drug.

View original technical description
The neocortex is the part of the brain that has expanded most dramatically in size and complexity in parallel with the development of human intellectual abilities. Here, countless thousands of pieces of information about our own bodies and the world around us are integrated and processed to generate perceptions and memories and to initiate appropriate responses. These pieces of information arrive from all over the nervous system as electrical signals. These electrical signals are transferred from one nerve cell, or neurone, to another via tiny chemical signals that in turn generate electrical and chemical events in each follower neurone. The receiving neurones are often very complex, in their shapes and in their electrical and chemical properties. Each one is made up of many different compartments into which information can be channelled. The properties of these different compartments, the way that events in them interact with events in other compartments and how they work together to transform the many different pieces of information that constantly bombard each neurone, into the output of that cell, is the subject of this project. We focus particularly on properties that are affected in neurological diseases such as the several different types of epilepsy, in some cases as the possible cause, in others as the brain?s response to another change or insult.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Alex Thomson (Principal Investigator)Arnaud Ruiz (Co-Investigator)Mala Shah (Co-Investigator)

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Original classification

Research Grant

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