image: Mauro Costa-Mattioli view more
Credit: Credit to the photographer: Federico Ciminari
Washington, DC – Dr. Mauro Costa-Mattioli has been awarded the 2008 International Grand Prize in Neurobiology by the journal Science and Eppendorf AG. He is being recognized for his research into memory formation and processing.
"I think that these findings constitute a fundamental advance that holds the hope of not only making animals smarter, but also, ultimately of developing new therapies for people with age-related memory loss or the more devastating memory loss associated with Alzheimer's Disease," said Costa-Mattioli, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
In his prize-winning essay, Costa-Mattioli describes how he and his colleagues found a type of molecular switch in mice that "determines" whether a long-term memory is made from an experience. "I decided to focus my research on eIF2-alpha since it regulates two fundamental processes which are critical for the formation of long-lasting memories: new protein synthesis and the activity of a memory repressor protein, ATF4," he said. When the neuron protein eIF2-alpha is activated, it suppresses a neuron's production of other proteins that allow the brain to form long-lasting memories.
Costa-Mattioli investigated eIF2-alpha's role in the formation of long-term memories and in long-term potentiation by studying mice with reduced eIF2-alpha activity. These mice appeared to have improved spatial memory - they learned to remember the location of a hidden platform in a pool faster than normal mice did - and the synaptic connections between their neurons lasted for longer than those of normal mice.
The Eppendorf and Science Prize in Neurobiology recognizes outstanding neurobiological research by a young scientist, as described in a 1,000-word essay based on research performed within the last three years. The grand prize winner receives $25,000 from Eppendorf, and the winner's essay, "Switching memories ON and OFF," will be published in the 7 November 2008 issue of the journal Science.
The winner and the finalists will be recognized at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November in Washington, DC.
2008 Grand Prize Winner
The author of the prize-winning essay, Mauro Costa-Mattioli, received his bachelor's degree in biology from the University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1998, he was offered an opportunity to continue his studies in France, where he received his master's degree (diplôme universitaire) from Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, and holds a doctorate from the University of Nantes under the supervision of Sylviane Billaudel. During his graduate work, he studied genetic variability of positive-stranded RNA viruses. In 2002, he joined the laboratory of Nahum Sonenberg at McGill University, Montreal, as a postdoctoral fellow. His work defined the role of translational (protein synthesis) control in long-lasting synaptic plasticity and memory formation. In the summer of 2008, he joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, as an assistant professor of neuroscience. Using multidisciplinary approaches, Costa-Mattioli's lab studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying long-term synaptic plasticity, learning and memory, and related neurological disorders.
Finalists
Hendrikje Nienborg for her essay "Visual Perception: Interactions between Sensory and Decision Processes." Nienborg received an M.Sc. in neuroscience from the University of Oxford, UK, in 2000. She continued her studies at Munich University, Germany, and was awarded her M.D. in 2003 and her Ph.D. in 2005. She then joined Bruce Cumming's lab at the NIH as a postdoctoral fellow. Also a sculptor, Nienborg is fascinated by visual perception and our ability to perceive depth, the focus of her research. For her graduate work she showed that disparity-selective neurons in primate primary visual cortex are limiting factors for depth perception. In her postdoctoral work, she seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying neuronal correlates of perceptual decisions in behaving monkeys.
Claudio Hetz for his essay "Protein Misfolding Disorders and ER Stress Signals." Hetz received his undergraduate degree in biotechnology engineering from the University of Chile in 2000. In his doctorate work with Claudio Soto at Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Geneva, he showed that prion pathogenesis involves endoplasmic reticulum stress responses. In 2004, he joined Stanley Korsmeyer's lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow and then continued his projects in Laurie Glimcher's lab at Harvard. During this period he expanded his studies on neurodegeneration, addressing the connection between apoptosis and the unfolded protein response in vivo. Since 2007, he has been an assistant professor at the University of Chile and an adjunct professor at Harvard. His laboratory uses animal models to investigate the signaling responses involved in protein misfolding disorders.
For the full text of essays by the winner and the finalists and for information about applying for next year's awards, see Science at Web site: www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/prizes/eppendorf/eppenprize.shtml
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and serves 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, reaching 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The nonprofit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.
Eppendorf was founded in Hamburg in 1945 and has more than 2,400 employees worldwide. The company has subsidiaries in 20 countries and is represented in all other markets by distributors.
In fiscal 2007, the company’s sales revenues amounted to € 346 million with earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of € 62.5 million.