Goals

Main goals of the BrainTrain project

To find therapeutic strategies for diseased brain and training young researchers with an excellent integrative and multidisciplinary perspective on brain research are the main objectives of the project:

1. Applying novel gene mapping strategies to identify new disease loci.
This effort will build on our novel models for inheritance patterns of complex traits and our well-phenotyped patient populations and mouse models.

2. Identifying the gene and protein networks that orchestrate basal neuronal communication and connectivity and to ask how these networks are altered in these brain diseases.
This effort will build on our novel models for gene-networks and several new biophysical methods to monitor neuronal communication and connectivity.

3. Integrating our knowledge of neuronal communication and connectivity to the performance of neuronal networks.
This effort will build on our capacity to record neuronal activity patterns from many individual cells and to detect multiple brain rhythms.

4. The designing of therapeutic strategies for these brain diseases.
This effort will integrate information from all other objectives and build on behavioural and histological assessments of animal models. BrainTrain will build on the availability of completed genomic databases to facilitate forward (phenotype to genotype) and reverse (genotype to phenotype) genetic approaches and combining mouse and human studies.

The research objectives of BrainTrain:

• Genetics of diseased brain (dementia, Parkinson’s, and major depressive disorder)
• Neurodegenerative disease-linked changes of the synaptic interactome
• Neurodegenerative disease-linked molecular/cellular variations in neurotransmission
• Impaired information processing in neuronal networks of diseased brain
• Therapeutics for diseased brain (dementia, Parkinson’s, and major depressive disorder)