About

 

For us to function as humans our memories are crucial, but we do not want to remember everything in every little detail but instead we need to extract key information enabling us to deal with future events. This processing of memories – highlighting important events, extracting overlapping, salient information and deleting unnecessary data – is probably one of the main reasons why we need to sleep.

The Genzel lab is interested in investigating how sleep influences memory processing in whole brain networks and which factors such as previous knowledge (schemas), novelty, plasticity and disease can influence this processing. To achieve this aim we combine different approaches and investigate mice, rats and humans. In rodents we apply a variety of molecular, electrophysiology, and behavioral approaches such as pharmacology, tetrode drives (units, lfp), immediate early gene analysis and viral methods. In humans, we combine functional magnetic resonanz imaging with classic polysomnography in the sleep lab. We use these methods to understand physiological sleep and memory mechanisms in healthy controls as well as investigate effects of disease with animal models and human patients suffering from e.g. depression and schizophrenia.

Additionally, the Genzel lab aims to develop new behavioural tasks to investigate more complex, semantic memories in rodents (Object Space Task, HexMaze) and promotes better handling methods (no tail-pick ups, see Animal Handling).

Current Projects:

  • Systems consolidation during sleep

  • Plasticity in the prefrontal cortex and memory abstraction

  • Previous knowledge effects on memory consolidation

  • Novelty for hippocampal consolidation

  • Changes in semantic memory in models of autism and depression

The Genzel lab thrives on and values diversity in all aspects. For example the lab has a mixture of international and local members. Overall lab members have come from 38 different countries: Albania Argentina Belgium Brazil Bulgaria China Chile Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary India Indonesia Iran Italy Marocco Mexico Moldova Netherlands Nigeria North Macedonian Poland Romania Spain Sri Lanka Taiwan Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom United States Usbekistan Vietnam. We value different views, provide a friendly environment, and like to have a social life, in addition to hard work in science.

 

Info

Donders Insitute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour

Radboud University

Faculty of Science

Postal address:

Postbus 9010

6500GL Nijmegen

Netherlands

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