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News Beck 10.2019
An interneuron (bright, with long appendages) from the hippocampus of the rat. The finely branched axon (top left cloud) surrounds the cell bodies of pyramidal cells and can inhibit these effectively.
© Leonie Pothmann/Uni Bonn

Publication

Epilepsy: Function of "brake cells" disrupted

In some forms of epilepsy, the function of certain "brake cells" in the brain is presumed to be disrupted. This may be one of the reasons why the electrical malfunction is able to spread from the point of origin across large parts of the brain. A current study by the University of Bonn with members of the cluster of excellence ImmunoSensation2, in which researchers from Lisbon were also involved, points in this direction. The results are published in the renowned "Journal of Neuroscience".

Publication

Leonie Pothmann, Christian Klos, Oliver Braganza, Sarah Schmidt, Oihane Horno, Raoul-Martin Memmesheimer and Heinz Beck: Altered dynamics of canonical feed-back inhibition predicts increased burst transmission in chronic epilepsy; The Journal Of Neuroscience; https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2594-18.2019

Related news

Dr. Ivana Jorgacevic und Prof. Dr. Rayk Behrendt have discovered that the inflammatory messenger substance interferon-alpha can trigger Sjögren's syndrome: The researchers in Bonn.

Publication

New test points to precision treatment for autoimmune condition

—Interferon alpha is an inflammatory mediator that can cause Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease. This is revealed in a recent study carried out by the University Hospital Bonn together with the University of Bonn, the University of Edinburgh and Newcastle University. Their findings, which have been published in the journal “Lancet Rheumatology,” could make it easier in the medium term to develop drugs to fight this chronic condition.
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Precise Konsortium

Publication Honors & Funding

Making Cancer Cells More Predictable: PRECISE Aims to Forecast Therapeutically Actionable Vulnerabilities

—Which genes and signaling pathways does a cancer cell require to survive? And which of these could serve as therapeutic targets? The pan-European initiative PRECISE aims to identify such vulnerabilities not only through labor-intensive laboratory experiments but also by predicting them using computational models. The UKB and the University of Bonn, represented by Prof. Dr. Maximilian Billmann and Prof. Dr. Jonathan Schmid-Burgk, are among the founding partners of the consortium. The scientific vision of the initiative has now been published in a commentary in Nature Genetics.
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Bild

Publication

Focus on the Guardians of the Antibody Response

—For the immune system to effectively combat pathogens, antibody responses must be precisely controlled. So-called follicular regulatory T cells (Tfr cells) play a key role in this process by limiting excessive immune responses and helping to maintain immune tolerance. Researchers at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB) and the University of Bonn have now developed a robust laboratory method that allows Tfr cells to be generated from precursor cells and studied in a targeted manner. The results were recently published in the journal Cellular & Molecular Immunology.
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