ERC awards 15th grant to Max-Delbrück Center
Dr James Poulet, of the Max-Delbrück Center (MDC) for Molecular Medicine and the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, Germany, has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to continue his research on how the brain generates sensory perception.
This marks the 15th ERC grant to be awarded to MDC researchers since 2009 and the second to be won by Poulet, who set up his laboratory with a €1.5m Starting Grant.
His newly awarded €2m Consolidator Grant will last over five years and could help pave the way to a better understanding of pain perception and neurological conditions like schizophrenia.
By training mice to report somatosensory stimuli delivered to their forepaw, Poulet and his team recently discovered that the same brain region and even individual nerve cells in the primary somatosensory cortex detect and are required for the processing of touch and cool.
Poulet now hopes to explore how it is “possible that different sensory inputs like cold and touch can be discriminated from one another when they are detected by the very same cells”, as well as how they are “integrated or ‘bound’ together to generate a single, coherent percept of a cool object”.
To answer these questions, he plans to continue using the mouse forepaw model and current optogenetic and behavioural approaches.
