Professor Dr Alexander Borst
- Section Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
- Location Martinsried, Germany
- Election year 2011
Research
Alexander Borst’s scientific focus is on neural computation. As an example for that, he studies motion vision on flies. Already at his time at Friedrich-Mischer-Laboratory of the Max-Planck-Society, he could demonstrate that elementary motion detection in flies follows the rules of the so-called ‘Reichardt-Detector’, where signals from adjacent photoreceptors become multiplied after one on of them has been delayded by a low-pass filter.
Combining genetic methods, electrophysiology and modelling, he and his team recently discovered that motion information is extracted from the retinal images in two separate channels. An ON-channel only processes moving dark-bright edges, while an OFF-channel processes moving bright-dark-edges. Both pathways converge at the level of the large output neurons of the fly optic lobe. Current work aims at identifying all those neurons in the fly visual system that participate in motion detection and, thus, to unravel the complete neural circuit underlying this basic and important form of neural computation.
Combining genetic methods, electrophysiology and modelling, he and his team recently discovered that motion information is extracted from the retinal images in two separate channels. An ON-channel only processes moving dark-bright edges, while an OFF-channel processes moving bright-dark-edges. Both pathways converge at the level of the large output neurons of the fly optic lobe. Current work aims at identifying all those neurons in the fly visual system that participate in motion detection and, thus, to unravel the complete neural circuit underlying this basic and important form of neural computation.