This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three neuroscientists: John O'Keefe, a researcher at University College London, UK, and May-Britt and Edvard Moser, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, in Trondheim.
The award was awarded for his work that led to the discovery “of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain”, announced the Nobel committee at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm (Sweden).
More precisely, this “internal GPS” in the brain “allows us to orient ourselves in space and demonstrates the existence of a cellular basis for a high-level cognitive function”, the Nobel committee says in a statement.
John O'Keefe discovered the first component of this positioning system in 1971, says the Press release. In the brains of the laboratory rats he studied, he found that, depending on the position the rats occupy in the room, there were different areas of the hippocampus – a region of the brain located in the temporal lobes – to be activated.
He called these cells of the hippocampus “place cells” – an area normally related to memory, which was able, in this case too, to store the positioning information registered at each moment by the mouse.
More than 30 years later, in 2005, May-Britt and Edvard Moser discovered another component of this positioning system, which they called “grid cells”, located in the entorhinal cortex – a region of the brain linked to the hippocampus. These cells generate a coordinate system and allow you to understand not only where they are, but also how to find the way.
It is this system that allows us to go from one place to another without getting lost, that allows us to have a perception of our position in space.
Since, in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease, those brain areas are affected, “understanding this global positioning system of the brain may help to understand the mechanism underlying the devastating loss of spatial memory that affects people who suffer from it. disease”, stresses the Nobel communiqué.
Author Antonio Piedade
Science in the Regional Press – Ciência Viva
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