Grants awarded to the School in March 2013

Staff in the School have received grants from the following funding sources.

Alzheimer's Society

Iris Oren in the Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems has recently been awarded a three year project grant (£224,772) from the Alzheimer's Society. Matt Nolan in the Centre for Integrative Physiology is co-Investigator. The title of the project is ‘Disentangling network dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease pathology: cause, consequence and rescue’.

The hippocampus is a region of the brain critical in memory processing, and one of the first brain areas to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease. The circuits of the hippocampus comprise excitatory neurons, as well as diverse populations of inhibitory neurons. The latter are critical in controlling the activity in the network. The project will focus on the heterogeneous population of inhibitory cells and ask which specific components of the inhibitory circuitry are affected early in a rodent model of Alzheimer’s disease pathology. We will tease out the changes to specific subtypes of cells within the complex network of the hippocampus, and ask what the functional consequences of these changes are - both in relation to seizures and processing information. Identifying which elements of the circuit are affected early in the disease will provide an exciting avenue for therapeutic intervention.

Medical Research Council

Thomas Theil in the Centre for Integrative Physiology has been awarded a Medical Research Council grant totalling £564,054 to study the ‘Molecular control of corpus callosum development by Gli3’.

The corpus callosum, as the largest fibre tract in the brain, coordinates the exchange of information between the two cerebral hemispheres. Malformation of the corpus callosum is one of the most frequent brain anomalies found at birth and has been identified in over 50 different human congenital syndromes. Callosal malformation is a cause of mental retardation having a wide range of cognitive, behavioural and neurological consequences. This grant analyses the molecular mechanisms underlying the callosal malformation caused by mutations in Gli3, a key regulator of cortical development. It examines the interactions between Gli3, Fgf and Wnt/beta-catenin signalling and uses a deep sequencing approach to identify genes regulated by Gli3.

Galician Government

Dr. Antón Barreiro-Iglesias, currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Fundación Barrié in the Becker group in the Centre for Neuroregeneration has been awarded one of the highly competitive grants from the recently created "I2C Plan" of the Galician government (Galicia, Spain). This award allows him to continue his research project for 2 years at the University of Edinburgh and will then fund his return to the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) to establish an independent career.