Professor Gaspar Jekely

About me:

My research interests include the structure, function and evolution of neural circuits, the mechanisms of neuromodulation and the evolution of neuronal cell types and nervous systems. My group studies the ciliated larvae of the marine annelid Platynereis and other marine organisms.

We are interested in the neural circuit bases of behaviour and how neuromodulators confer flexibility to circuit activity and behaviours. Our aim is to study this at the single neuron level and for entiry neural circuits. This requres the mapping of circuits at synaptic resolution and the mapping of neuromodulators and their receptors to single neurons. Achieving this at cellular resolution in an entire nervous system is only possible by studying small animals that are also amenable to experimental manipulations. We study larval stages of the marine annelid Platynereis dumerilii to understand contextual neuromodulation in fully mapped, stereotypical circuits, and its changes during development. Since several modulators and their receptors found in Platynereis are conserved across bilaterians, including humans, the principles and mechanisms we uncover in the simple and tractable annelid nervous system may inform us about similar processes in more complex brains. We use whole-body connectomics and overlay neuromodulatory networks with single-cell resolution onto synaptic connectomes. We complement this with circuit-wide activity imaging, behavioural analysis, and neurogenetics to study how the sensory environment and the modulatory landscape influences circuit activity. Genome editing and transgenic access to single neurons in Platynereis allow us to link the network output to molecular function at the synapse. We hope to uncover how neuronal circuits coordinate body-wide circuit activity and behaviour and how neuromodulatory signals contribute to flexibility.

1999 Ph.D. in Genetics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

1995 Diploma in Biology and Genetics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

2017- Professor of Neuroscience, Living Systems Institute, University of Exeter

2017- Associate Director, Living Systems Institute, University of Exeter

2007-2017 Max Planck Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen

2004-2007 FEBS Postdoctoral fellow, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, Detlev Arendt’s laboratory

2003 Junior fellow at the Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest, Hungary

2000-2003 EMBO Postdoctoral fellow, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, Pernille Rørth’s laboratory