Institute for Neuroscience (IN) Areas of research: Neurosciences, Cancer. Location: Alicante (Comunidad Valenciana) Website: in.umh.es; Contact: jbarbas@csic.es
The mission of the Institute for Neuroscience (IN) is to investigate the development, structure and function of the nervous system in normal and pathological conditions. Our general objective is to improve our understanding of the brain. In other words, to understand the functioning of the healthy brain, in order to shed light on dysfunctions leading to disease. This goal is recognized as the main challenge faced by modern biology. We aim to solve fundamental questions on the nervous system that cut across boundaries of description. These questions can be grouped into a common theme: how is the largescale organization of functional brain circuits assembled during development, how are they changed by experience and how do pathological alterations in this configuration affect brain function. This crucial issue can be broken down into chunks, which are addressed by individual laboratories working at a single level of description. The IN is organized into functional research units that are flexible and serve as a framework that facilitates research activities and stimulates interaction and scientific collaboration among its members. We seek to provide researchers with a nurturing environment to allow pursuing the most important questions in neuroscience. The IN provides laboratories, equipment and technical personnel for neurobiological research. It is organized into research units intended to be functional and flexible and serve mainly as an organizational framework to facilitate research activities and stimulate interaction and scientific collaboration among the members of the Institute. We also maintain active interchange programmes with universities, research centres and neurobiology laboratories around the world. The research groups at the IN employ a wide variety of techniques that cover the fields of molecular and cellular biology, physiology, genetics, and computational and systems neurobiology. Among the technical facilities, the IN are fully equipped with tissue, cell culture and experimental embryology rooms, optical projection tomography (OPT), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), confocal and two photon microscopy, and special areas for behavioural experiments.
34 I. Life Sciences
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Institute for Neuroscience (IN)
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