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Alexander Borst aims at understanding the foundations of information processing at the level of small neural circuits, focusing on the visual course control system in Drosophila. Borst’s lab uses a comprehensive approach , combining electron microscopy-aided anatomical reconstructions of the circuit, physiological characterization by both imaging and whole cell patch recordings, genetic circuit manipulation in behaving flies, computational modeling and last but not least, engineering of fly-inspired robots that implement the theoretical principles and test their functionality.
Borst’s outstanding research has yielded a very precise and detailed description of the circuit at the single cell resolution as well as a thorough understanding of the computations it performs.
Several of his major scientific contributions include the discovery that the direction of visually perceived motion is calculated following the Reichardt Model (Single & Borst, Science 1998), the separation of visual information in the fly brain into ON- and OFF-channels, similar to bipolar cells in the retina of vertebrate eyes (Jösch, Schnell, Raghu, Reiff & Borst, Nature 2010) and the existence of four types of neurons in each channel, tuned to one of the four cardinal directions (right, left, up, down) that project into four separate neuronal layers based on their preferred direction (Maisak et al, Nature 2013).

https://www.neuro.mpg.de/borst