The European Research Council (ERC) promotes cutting-edge research through extensive and long-term funding. The ERC Advanced Grant is awarded to established world-class researchers with significant research achievements over the last ten years and the grant size is up to €2.5 million for a maximum period of five years.
Andrew Ewing has now received an Advanced Grant for the third time. His new project aims to develop analytical chemical methods at the nanoscale (electrochemical, mass spectrometric, spectroscopic) to understand how organelles in cells regulate neural communication.
“I am delighted by the honour of receiving the ERC grant again and excited how it will help my group’s your research," says Andrew Ewing.
Communication in the brain
Ewing's team hopes to dissect different parts of the cell, in both living and fixed samples, with chemical measurements that have not been done before.
"We are aiming to push the boundaries of how small we can measure parts of the cell to make quantitative measurements on, in order to understand how neural communication works in the brain. This will allow us to define the processes in organelles that regulate cell and communication plasticity. As far as I know, this will be the first time that the interaction between these organelles is investigated, as there are limited analytical tools to do this.”
Major impact
Andrew Ewing's research is basic research which in turn is fundamental to all areas of brain research, including understanding learning and memory, development, and in particular neural degeneration. The new methods will also have a major impact in chemistry and cell biology, for example our understanding of the function of beta cells in the pancreas, which have been shown to undergo partial release, and its role in diabetes.
“As large parts of the world have been infected by the SARS2 virus, which causes Covid, and it is known to have adverse effects on many organs, including the brain, where it affects memory and cognition, it has perhaps never been more important to understand the chemical basis of memory processes,” says Andrew Ewing.
