Neural circuits for survival instincts
Vanessa Stempel receives an ERC Starting Grant to investigate brain circuits supporting instinctive behaviors
Instinctive behaviors such as defense, feeding, aggression, and care for offspring have evolved across the animal kingdom to ensure survival without the need for learning. However, scientists still do not fully understand which mechanisms in the brain make these ‘survival’ behaviors adaptable to different situations. Vanessa Stempel, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, and her team aim to answer this question with the ‘CoreInstincts’ project. To support her work, the European Research Council (ERC) has now awarded Stempel a 1.5 million Euro Starting Grant over the next five years.
Instinctive behaviors - such as hunting, escaping, and mating - are essential built-in survival strategies that animals are born with and need little or no prior experience to perform. In vertebrates (animals with backbones), these behaviors are driven by brain circuits that have remained similar across species throughout evolution. In recent years, scientists have learned that instinctive behaviors are not just rigid and repetitive actions; they can be flexible, allowing animals to adapt both how they choose and how they perform certain actions. To fully understand how this behavioral flexibility works, it is important to study the specific brain circuits involved, with a particular focus on synapses (the connections between nerve cells) and cellular processes.
Vanessa Stempel and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research are focusing on a part of the brain called the periaqueductal gray. This region of the brain, found in all vertebrates, is critical for the production of nearly all instinctive behaviors. The ERC Starting Grant will allow the researchers to study the production of instinctive behaviors in the house mouse – a survival specialist. “We are particularly excited to study the circuits that control instinctive behaviours with an emphasis on the female brain. We seek to find out how naturally occurring neuromodulatory changes during the estrous cycle affect the cellular and network properties of the periaqueductal gray, and ultimately the animals’ behaviour”, says Stempel. To this end, she and her team will be using a combination of molecular, cellular and circuit-based methods including neural activity recordings in freely moving mice.
About the scientist
Vanessa Stempel received her MSc in Biomedicine from University College London (UCL) and her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. As a postdoctoral fellow, Stempel worked at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UCL and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK. In 2021, she joined the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, where she heads the ‘Instinctive Behaviour Circuits’ group. Her work focuses on understanding how evolutionarily conserved brain circuits in the rodent midbrain contribute to the flexibility of instinctive behaviors by studying the underlying synaptic and cellular mechanisms.
About the ERC
The European Research Council's Starting Grants support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields and aim to help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, build their teams and pursue their most promising ideas. The funding - totaling nearly €780 million - is part of the EU's Horizon Europe program. The latest call received 3,474 proposals of which 14,2 % were selected for funding. This year, 44% of the Starting Grants were awarded to female researchers. Stempel is one of sixteen 2024 Starting Grant recipients currently affiliated with the Max Planck Society.
