Florida hosts the first U.S. institution of the world-renowned Max Plank Society, which is Germany’s most successful research organisation, now with over 80 institutes worldwide. The Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI), a 501(c)3 not-for-profit research organisation that brings together neuroscientists from around the world in order to answer fundamental questions about brain function and development and also to develop new technologies that make groundbreaking scientific discoveries feasible.
The MPFI is asking—and answering—a number of complex questions about the human brain, one of the last true scientific frontiers.
One such question recently asked and researched: How does what our eyes see reflect in the incredibly complex circuitry of the brain?
The MPFI’s Fitzpatrick Lab, led by Dr. Madineh Sedigh-Sarvestani, recently had their findings published in the journal Neuron.
Dr. Sedigh-Sarvestani noted that having a diverse team was crucial since people with different backgrounds and skill sets can offer a multitude of perspectives and possible solutions.
Dr. Sedigh-Sarvestani initially teamed up with Kuo-Sheng Lee, who was a graduate student at the time who was also interested in exploring uncharted areas in visual regions of the tree shrew brain.
The Fitzpatrick lab is uniquely positioned as one of only a handful of labs in the United States that works with tree shrews, which are small animals closely related to primates. Tree shrews have to move quickly and with high acuity since they are prey to large birds and predators to insects.
“Other animals with different habitats or movement abilities have different needs from their visual system and therefore exhibit correspondingly different visual acuity and abilities,” according to a lab press release. “However, the basic structure of the visual system of many mammals contains common elements.”
A major question that defined the project was whether the visual cortex of tree shrews was able to process visual information similarly to other primates and ferrets. This would suggest that the area worked similarly useful to these different animals, even though each species has unique visual demands.
As the questions grew, so did the team.
Later, they expanded the team to include Juliane Jaepel, a postdoctoral fellow who, at that time, was on a similar line of inquiry with ferrets. Jaepel’s perspective allowed for a better understanding of the team’s observations of the tree shrew.
Other team members were added as puzzle pieces no longer fit together from the complex data. Research assistant Rachel Satterfield shared her understanding of viral vector tools, for example, and she also assisted in the collection and analysis of structural brain data.
The team was largely woman-driven and bolstered by the various expertise of the women involved.
Researchers received guidance and mentorship from principal investigator David Fitzpatrick, CEO and scientific director of Max Planck Florida.
“At every step, from the inception of the question and hypothesis to the final writing of the report, David challenged us to provide stronger evidence for the patterns we found in the data, why our findings mattered and what new questions they brought up, and how to communicate all this to the rest of the scientific community,” said Madineh.
Since such a minority of labs are working with tree shrews, there is not much existing research on how the brain is structured. This added increased risk and greater potential for reward for researchers.
“This whole project was a creative challenge in that we discovered a new explanation for data that had been previously observed in other animals,” Madineh explained. “One of the first Eureka moments was when I realized that the structural connectivity between brain regions, measured using histological data from brain tissue, could easily explain the neural response data I had collected in the living brain.”
In future research she intends to study how the visual systems of different animals, those specific brain circuits, are optimised to the animal’s specific visual needs. Those needs are determined by many factors, including how the statistics of the animal’s environment and how the animal moves to explore that environment.
This will help foster a new understanding of the visual systems and why “sensory-motor deficits occur with disease and age, and how to slow and prevent these deficits so that the brain and body jointly function in an optimal manner.”
George Scorsis 