Alexander Borst

Alexander "Axel" 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 Circuits - Computation - Models.

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.

Alexander Borst is member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Among others, he received the Research Award of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) 2014 and the Valentino Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience 2014.

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 body, plays an important role in the olfactory learning 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 computes the direction of motion in separate ON and OFF-channels, similar to bipolar cells in the retina of vertebrate eyes. (Jösch, Schnell, Raghu, Reiff & Borst, Nature 2010)
  • in each channel, there exist four types of neurons tuned to one of the four cardinal directions (right, left, up, down) that project, according to their preferred direction, into four separate neuropile layers where they contact large neurons involved in visual course-control. (Maisak et al, Nature 2013)

References
  1. Heisenberg, M.; Borst, A.; Wagner, S. & Byers, D. (1985). "Drosophila Mushroom Body Mutants are Deficient in Olfactory Learning" (PDF). Journal of Neurogenetics. Informa Healthcare. 2 (1): 1–30. doi:10.3109/01677068509100140. PMID 4020527.
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