Sussex Neuroscience
The brain's experience of the world relies upon a network of complex and dynamic neural circuits that serve to process the huge volumes of sensory information that an individual experiences, allowing it to generate behaviour.
Centre of Excellence
To advance our understanding of such labyrinthine networks, Sussex Neuroscience aims to establish a new centre of excellence that will encourage collaboration across the broad and interdisciplinary activities in neuroscience research at the University of Sussex.
Currently, the University has nearly 70 principal investigators working on the nervous system that are spread across the Schools of Life Sciences, Psychology, Engineering and Informatics, and Medicine. Building on a long and distinguished history in neuroscience research, Sussex Neuroscience aims to build a centre of excellence that will bring them together to offer the very best in neuroscience training and research.
To support this initiative, Professor Leon Lagnado, from the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, has been appointed as Professor of Neuroscience in the School of Life Science and as Director of Sussex Neuroscience.
Key to understanding how information is transmitted through, and processed by, circuits of neurones is the role of synapses – structures that allow one neurone to pass information to another through the release of a chemical 'neurotransmitter'.
The functional properties of neural circuits and synapses are not fixed but have dynamic properties that are described as 'plastic'; that is, the system can adapt and transform in response to different conditions. The retina provides an excellent context in which to study information processing in a neural circuit. It receives information through light entering the eye and transmits signals to the brain's visual processing centres, and is a model for studying the molecular mechanisms underlying neural circuitry and synaptic activity.
Professor Leon Lagnado's work
The ground-breaking work of Professor Leon Lagnado investigates the complex cellular and molecular mechanisms that underpin the processing of visual stimuli.
The retina provides a system where the input, light, can be very easily controlled and the output, in the form of electrophysiological signals, can be measured quantitatively to analyse how sensory information is transformed into a neural response.
To do this, his laboratory uses two approaches, asking how the synaptic terminal works at a molecular level and how synapses function within the retina's neural circuits. To study the synapse at the molecular level, electrophysiological techniques and total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM) – an imaging technique with a potential resolution of single molecules – is applied to isolated neurones that express fluorescent fusion reporter proteins.
To understand how the synapse functions more broadly within the retinal circuits, they have designed experiments to monitor synaptic output in response to electrical activation across hundreds of neurons simultaneously, using specifically designed fluorescent reporter proteins and a fluorescence imaging technique called multiphoton microscopy that allows imaging of individual synapses up to a depth of -0.5 mm in living tissue.
Using such techniques, it is possible to monitor synaptic activity in real time in live animals to observe how retinal networks respond to specific visual stimuli.
The work aims to understand how the synaptic properties of different retinal neurones contribute to certain functions as well the 'plasticity' of retinal synapses and how this contributes to network adaptation. Professor Lagnado's lab is the first to apply multiphoton microscopy to study the activity of large populations of synapses and their recent work highlights how these techniques can also be used to study interaction between different senses in a live animal.
The research group
Professor Lagnado's research group joins many other neuroscience researchers at Sussex working to answer questions on how nervous systems sense and respond to the world, how consciousness arises and how, when dysfunction occurs in the nervous system, we can treat diseases that interfere with neural processing.
The challenge of answering such questions involves research in multiple disciplines from molecular biology to psychiatry and engineering to computer science and informatics.
A significant component of the research will be in the cellular and molecular neurosciences, with particular strengths in learning and memory, neuropharmacology, sensory systems and synaptic physiology.
Among others, this collaborative effort includes Professor Guy Richardson FRS (Professor of Neuroscience), who studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms of the inner ear and mutations that lead to deafness, and Dr Thomas Nowotny (Reader in Informatics), whose work combines dynamic systems theory, statistics and hybrid systems experiments to understand information processing in neural networks associated with the olfactory system.
The scope of Sussex Neuroscience is broad and will encompass work being done in other major research centres within the University, including work in clinical neurology by Professor Nigel Leigh at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and the scientific study of consciousness at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science directed by Professors Hugo Critchley and Anil Seth. It may have future potential opportunities in collaboration with the new Translational Drug Discovery Group.
The brainchild of Daniel Osorio (Professor of Neuroscience and Deputy Head of the School of Life Sciences), Laurence Pearl FRS (Head of the School of Life Sciences) and Pete Clifton (Head of the School of Psychology), Sussex Neuroscience aims to bring many of these scientists together in a co-ordinated and integrated way.
About 20 research groups will be located in a new Centre for Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience within a three-storey building that is being specially refurbished to provide an infrastructure to facilitate the best research and encourage the exchange of ideas. Their remit is to establish a worldclass research facility that will foster crossgroup collaboration, advance research and improve funding opportunities.
Guy's perspective
Professor or Neuroscience, Guy Richardson said: "Hearing loss can be caused by a variety of factors and is a serious problem affecting many millions of people. Discovering how the ear works at the molecular level and understanding the causes of deafness are the goals of my research.
"Working on the inner ear is a challenge as it is small, contains very few sensory cells (a few thousand mechanosensory hair cells as opposed to the millions of light-responsive photoreceptors present in the eye), and is encased in hard bone. Genomic and in vitro methodologies have recently revolutionised our approaches to the inner ear.
"My work now focuses on developing models for understanding how mutations in various genes cause human hereditary hearing loss, and how certain medicines cause deafness as an unfortunate side effect.
‘Recently we have embarked upon a programme of research that aims to prevent the ototoxic side effects of a certain class of commonly used antibiotics, and are exploring a novel repair mechanism that allows sensory cells in the ear to reverse the short-term damage caused by these drugs."