In October, TU Dresden's Faculty of Medicine will launch the new event series "TUneD into Medical Science”. Renowned laureates in medicine are invited to engage in an inspiring dialogue about their research with students, scientists, physicians and the Dresden public. The series will kick off with Nobel Prize winner Prof. Thomas C. Südhof, a German-American biochemist and neuroscientist. In his research, he focuses on synapses as the fundamental switching board of the nervous system.

How are memories formed? Why do some of them enter long-term memory while others are forgotten after a short time? What happens in the brains of people who develop Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease? Can memory be “repaired”, if we were able to find out the causes? 

© Thomas Südhof

In his Nobel Prize lecture on October 10, the distinguished neuroscientist Thomas Südhof will give the Dresden audience exciting insights into memory research. Using models, he will explain in easily understandable English how experiments are conducted to investigate memory and which neuronal networks are involved in learning, storing and retrieving memories. To do so, Südhof delves into the smallest units: his field of research is the communication of nerve cells in the brain. He investigates how messenger substances, known as neurotransmitters, are transmitted from one cell to the next via synapses and what strengthens these connections to enable learning and memory.

For their discovery of the transport processes responsible for communication between cells, Thomas Südhof and his colleagues, the American biochemists James Rothman and Randy Schekman, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013. Their research fundamentally changed our understanding of many biological processes, including nerve cell communication, hormone secretion and general cell function, having a far-reaching impact on medical research and therapy.

In diseases such as autism or schizophrenia, for example, communication between nerve cells is disrupted by genetic mutations. For this reason, Thomas Südhof is investigating what triggers this malfunction and how it can be remedied.

The lecture "Mechanisms mediating long-term memory formation – Memory network: Neuronal circuits and the art of the long-term memory” will be held in English on October 10, 2024 at 4 pm in the lecture hall of the Dean's Office of TU Dresden’s Faculty of Medicine. Admission is free. Please register in advance if you would like to attend.

For those interested in science, there will be further opportunities from October 9 to 11 to gain a closer insight into Prof. Thomas Südhof's work and to enter into dialogue with him.
Click here for an overview of the program and the registration link.

Contact:
Anne-Stephanie Vetter
Staff Unit Public Relations of the Carl Gustav Carus Faculty of Medicine
of TUD Dresden University of Technology
+49 351 458 17903

www.tu-dresden.de/med