Gräfelfing, Germany - June 12, 2003
TILL Photonics Technology Award to Dr. Sachse at the Göttingen Neurobiology Conference
Dr. Silke Sachse is to be given the prestigious TILL Photonics Technology Award 2003 by Prof. Rainer Uhl (CEO, TILL Photonics GmbH) during the General Assembly of the German Neuroscience Society at the 29 th Neurobiology Conference in Göttingen, Germany, June 12 to 15, 2003. The prize is to reward excellence in developing novel techniques in the neurosciences, and is made annually to a young scientist in a German laboratory or to a young German scientist working outside the country.
Dr. Sachse was awarded the prize on the basis of her work on "New methods for research into complex neuronal networks," including the paper "The coding of odor-intensity in the honeybee antennal lobe: local computation optimizes odor identification," co-authored with Dr. C. Giovanni Galizia. The work was carried out at the Institute for Biology/Neurobiology at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Dr. Sachse studied the coding that animals use to designate odor identities, concentrations and mixtures, using real-time calcium imaging of input and output neurons of the honeybee antennal lobe while stimulating with concentrations of odors. The results showed that the computation on the input data by the network of neurons enhances the contrast between strong and weaker concentrations, thereby sharpening the response patterns. The network also improves the concentration invariance of spatio-temporal odor patterns that effectively define odor identity.
Dr. Sachse is at present a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, working with Dr. Leslie Vosshall.
TILL Photonics GmbH sponsors the Technology Award 2003 to symbolize the leading edge fluorescence imaging instruments that the company develops and has created over the last 10 years. The equipment, which is based on several patents for confocal and conventional fluorescence microscopes, is developed in collaboration with the BioImaging Zentrum (BIZ) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. TILL Photonics also collaborates with several leading German research institutions. The majority of TILL's customers are found in the fields of neurobiology, cell biology, biomedicine and pharmacology.