Tobias Bonhoeffer, PhD

Director
Head of the department of
Cellular and Systems Neurobiology

Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology
Am Klopferspitz 18
82152 München-Martinsried
Germany

Please visit our web site at: http://www.neuro.mpg.de/english/rd/csn/

See Nature, Vol. 399 (1999) pp.66ff.

Created with Imaris?. The Imaris? shadow projection rendering was used to generate this view at time point zero. The selected view has been calculated for all time points and can be seen as a Quicktime movie.

New spines emerge after LTP. The spines marked with red arrowheads grew 30-40 minutes after induction of LTP (dark red arrow). Blue dots denote the responses recorded intracellularly from the postsynaptic neuron. Complete data can be best viewed as a movie. View movie (1.1 mgs).


An orderly representation of the environment in the form of "cortical maps" is one of the fundamental principles of how information is represented in the brain. The interest of the group revolves around such cortical maps in the visual system. How are they structured, what is their functional relevance, how do they develop, and what is the role of visual experience during development?

Recently the two latter questions have been at the center of interest. They are addressed with both a "systems" and a "cellular" approach. In the former it is investigated how the visual system develops in a modified visual environment whereas in the latter it is investigated how such changes are achieved and which cellular and synaptic mechanisms are responsible for these changes.