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Research
Networks as a model of success
Research
Networks as a model of success
Excellent brain research needs the exchange of ideas – Katrin Amunts, scientific director of the European Human Brain Project, is convinced of this.
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Providing impetus, breaking new ground and taking criticism seriously – for neuroscientist Katrin Amunts, this is the basis needed to advance research. Equally indispensable for her is the exchange with others. She is breaking new ground to do so in her current project.
She is one of the most important international representatives of interdisciplinary brain research: Prof. Katrin Amunts, director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich and of the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. “Experts from research and medicine all over the world use her findings in the field of brain mapping,” emphasized the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of Science Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen when awarding Katrin Amunts the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class in March 2022.
Picture above: Excellent brain research needs the exchange of ideas – Katrin Amunts, scientific director of the European Human Brain Project, is convinced of this.
Only a few weeks earlier, Katrin Amunts had been awarded the Hector Science Prize. “These recognitions give confidence and encouragement to keep going”, says the Potsdam native. “However, I see the awards mainly as a credit to the teams involved. I mean that very seriously, because you can’t make an atlas like this by yourself.”
Fame and honour have no priority in her mind, anyway; Katrin Amunts’ driving force is the desire to do excellent science. She wants to fulfil a mission for society as a whole with her research: namely, to contribute to a better understanding of the brain with its 86 billion neurons and trillions of contact points. This knowledge is expected, for example, to help better predict the course of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or even to cure them.
Prof. Amunts and Prof. Markus Axer, a colleague from INM-1, have just published a joint paper on connectivity in the brain in a special issue of the journal Science. The magazine was published in November on the occasion of the Neuroscience 2022 conference in San Diego, USA where around 150,000 neuroscientists meet every year to discuss the latest scientific developments.
“In ‘Science’, we illustrate how our brain is networked – from the contact points of individual nerve cells to the connections between different brain regions – and what methods are needed to understand this intricate organization,” explains Katrin Amunts.
A unique method developed by the Jülich team provides important data: three-dimensional Polarized Light Imaging (PLI). It allows for the high-resolution visualization and examination of the elongated projections of nerve cells, the axons. The information about their pathways has been missing so far, despite being crucial for the interconnection in the network. PLI is part of the digital research infrastructure EBRAINS, which was developed in the Human Brain Project (HBP). EBRAINS brings together data and tools for brain analysis and simulation, and it offers researchers worldwide free access to them.
A look into the brain: image made with three-dimensional Polarised Light Imaging (3D-PLI). With this method, the elongated projections of nerve cells – called axons – can be visualized and examined in high resolution. “Anyone who doesn’t take criticism seriously is going down the wrong path.”
Katrin Amunts
“This wealth of data and the methods developed were also an important basis for the article in Science, which once again proves that the HBP facilitates internationally excellent science,” emphasizes Amunts. In 2023, its EU funding will expire. What will remain: “The HBP leaves behind not only important knowledge and, with EBRAINS, a publicly accessible infrastructure, but also a community that otherwise wouldn’t have come together in this way.”
There is another great merit to the HBP: it has made a decisive contribution to bringing supercomputing and neuroscience together, thus creating new technical prerequisites for a better understanding of the brain. This was also an important impetus for the establishment of the European supercomputing network FENIX, which offers a range of data and computing services and is the IT base of EBRAINS. “These are developments that have been driven forward by us neuroscientists in particular. We are proud to have provided the impetus,” the scientist sums up.
In fact, FENIX is supposed to enable brain researchers to use the new Jülich exascale computer. Together with JSC director Thomas Lippert, Amunts had already pointed out in a Science paper a year ago that brain research would need this computing power.
Giving stimulus and breaking new ground, but also dealing constructively with criticism – this belongs to everyday scientific life for Katrin Amunts: “Anyone who doesn’t take criticism seriously is going down the wrong path.” This is why Amunts attaches great importance to regularly taking a step back and looking at a problem from a different perspective. The exchange with her team is indispensable in this, be it at Jülich, Düsseldorf or internationally at the HBP.
As the first author of a so-called living paper – an open and public paper in which not only her own team but the entire brain research community can participate – Amunts has taken a completely new approach to the exchange of ideas. “We were deliberating the upcoming challenges in brain research in the HBP and wanted to discuss this question not only within the HBP, but internationally. That’s when the idea of the living paper came up,” says Amunts.
Since March 2022, researchers worldwide have been invited to add to or comment on the position paper published on the open access platform Zenodo. “Everyone can read it, everyone can say what might be missing,” says Amunts. The feedback is sometimes only a few lines long and sometimes five pages. The original number of authors has grown from about a dozen to over 70. Amunt’s conclusion so far: “The living paper is an open process – discussions included. This is not always easy, but in our view, it’s the right way to generate openness and transparency in order to set the course for brain research in the coming decade.”
Katja Lüers
Photos: Mareen Fischinger, Markus Axer und Katrin Amunts/Forschungszentrum Jülich