The University of Ulster has beaten rivals to persuade Nobel laureate Prof Bert Sakmann to join its staff, writes Cormac Sheridan.
The Biomedical Sciences Research Institute at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, has added some heft to its faculty by appointing a German Nobel prizewinner, Bert Sakmann, to a part-time professorship.
Sakmann has just retired from his position at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, but he is maintaining a full-time research effort and has established a new lab at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Munich.
His Coleraine appointment will support an ongoing collaboration with his former PhD student and postdoctoral fellow Kurt Saetzler, a lecturer in computational biology at the University of Ulster.
The project involves high resolution imaging and computer modelling of synapses, the tiny junctions between nerve cells across which chemical "messengers" called neurotransmitters are released in order to propagate a signal.
Sakmann shared the 1991 Nobel prize in medicine or physiology with his compatriot Erwin Neher for their work on explaining the function of ion channels, specialist proteins that form cell membrane pores. The process is fundamental to all life as it enables cells to interact with their external environment, and with their neighbouring cells without risking damage to their membrane surfaces.
During the mid-1970s Sakmann and Neher developed patch clamping, now a standard method for measuring the tiny electrical circuits established by ion channel functioning. They used this technique to probe the events that occur during the transmission of nerve signals across a synapse. "Ion channel research has shifted away from doing biophysical measurements to structure," Sakmann says.
His own work has gone in the opposite direction, however. Instead of working out the atomic-level details of ion channel proteins, he is now trying to understand how they operate in concert to influence nerve cell signalling within a specific region of the brain and, ultimately, the resulting behaviour.
"The idea is to measure what we call local circuits in the brain or in the cerebral cortex, at EM [electron microscopic] resolution," he says.
Sakmann's group is exploiting a new imaging technique, called "serial block-face scanning electron microscopy", which was developed by Winfried Denk at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg.
Sakmann's group will be analysing cortical columns, clusters of around 10,000 nerve cells, which constitute the smallest functional unit of the brain's cerebral cortex.
"Most behaviours are driven by several cortical columns, but there are activities that can be driven by a single cortical column," says Sakmann.
He wants to integrate behavioural observations with a detailed understanding of the myriad synaptic connections between the individual cells associated with that behaviour as seen in rat models.
The imaging work will generate around 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data. "This is where we come into the equation," says Kurt Saetzler. His group in Coleraine will be analysing the image data in order to generate three-dimensional (3D) computer models of the cells and their synapses.
"We're trying to get a virtual surface representation of the cell. The long-term aim is to use the 3-D representation to do modelling of the cell," he says.
Saetzler has developed an algorithm that can capture image data and generate an anatomically accurate representation of a cell.
Eventually, says Saetzler, the approach could yield new insights into disease-related processes. "Some diseases are related to a disrupted communication process [ between cells]. It's not absolutely clear at the minute how the smallest functional units are disrupted.