Alexander "Axel" Borst (born August 18, 1957 in

Bad Neustadt an der Saale Bad Neustadt an der Saale (, ), officially Bad Neustadt a.d.Saale and often simply called Bad Neustadt, is a town in northern Bavaria, Germany. It is the capital of the Rhön-Grabfeld district in Lower Franconia. It is situated on the rivers Fran ...

) is a German

neurobiologist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist specializing in neuroscience that deals with the anatomy and function of neurons, neural circuits, and glia, and their behavioral, biological, and psychological roles in health and disease. ...

. He is director at the

Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence The Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence (; abbreviated MPI-BI) is a non-university research institute of the Max Planck Society. The institute is dedicated to basic research on topics in behavioral ecology, evolutionary biology and ...

(formerly Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology) and head of the department Circuits – Computation – Models. Borst studied biology at the

University of Würzburg The Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg (also referred to as the University of Würzburg, in German ''Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg'') is a public research university in Würzburg, Germany. Founded in 1402, it is one of the ol ...

, 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 The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics is located in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is one of 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft). It was founded in 1968. The institute is studying signal a ...

Tübingen Tübingen (; ) is a traditional college town, university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer (Neckar), Ammer rivers. about one in ...

. 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 The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. In 2001, he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. Borst is member of the

German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (), in short Leopoldina, is the national academy of Germany, and is located in Halle (Saale). Founded on 1 January 1652, based on academic models in Italy, it was originally named the ''Academi ...

, the

Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities () is an independent public institution, located in Munich. It appoints scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledge within their subject. The general goal of th ...

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 Valentino Braitenberg (or ''Valentin von Braitenberg''; 18 June 1926 – 9 September 2011) was an Italian neuroscientist and cyberneticist. He was a former director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. H ...

Award for Computational Neuroscience 2014.

Scientific focus

In his doctoral research, Borst studied the olfactory sense of ''

Drosophila melanogaster ''Drosophila melanogaster'' is a species of fly (an insect of the Order (biology), order Diptera) in the family Drosophilidae. The species is often referred to as the fruit fly or lesser fruit fly, or less commonly the "vinegar fly", "pomace fly" ...

''. He discovered that dedicated brain structures known as

mushroom bodies The mushroom bodies or ''corpora pedunculata'' are a pair of structures in the Supraesophageal ganglion, brain of arthropods, including insects and Crustacean, crustaceans, and some annelids (notably the ragworm ''Platynereis dumerilii''). They a ...

play a crucial role in

olfactory The sense of smell, or olfaction, is the special sense through which smells (or odors) are perceived. The sense of smell has many functions, including detecting desirable foods, hazards, and pheromones, and plays a role in taste. In humans, it ...

learning in flies (Heisenberg, Borst, Wagner, Byers, J. Neurogenetics 1985). Since then, his work has focused on the question of how nerve cells process information and perform certain calculations. As an example of neuronal computation, he uses motion vision, i.e. the process by which nerve cells in the visual center of flies calculate the direction of motion of an object. Borst’s research aims to connect a formal, mathematical description of these processes with the underlying biophysical properties of nerve cells. By combining theoretical approaches and computer simulations with various experimental studies, he made the following major discoveries: * The calculation of directional motion in the fly brain formally follows to a large extent the so-called Reichardt model (Single & Borst, Science 1998). * Similar to the vertebrate retina, this computation is performed in two parallel pathways, an ON and an OFF channel (Jösch et al., Nature 2010). * In each of these channels, four subsets of neurons exist (T4 cells in the ON, T5 cells in the OFF channel), each maximally sensitive to one of the four orthogonal directions of motion (right, left, up, down). These cells are connected to four separate layers of neural tissue, where they are interconnected with large heading control neurons (Maisak et al., Nature 2013). * In T4 cells, the signal multiplication postulated in the Reichardt model is biophysically based on disinhibition (Groschner et al., Nature 2022).

External links

Homepage of the department Circuits - Computation - Models

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Borst, Alexander 20th-century German biologists 1957 births Living people Members of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina 21st-century German biologists Max Planck Institute directors University of Würzburg alumni