Dr. Jens Herberholz
Education:
1999 Ph.D. Technical University Munich, Germany
1995 M.Sc. Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany
1992 B.Sc. Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany
Work History:
2015-present: Co-Director, Brain & Behavior Initiative, University of Maryland, College Park
2013-2017: Director, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, University of Maryland, College Park
2012: Visiting Professor [sabbatical], Zoology Department, Technical University Munich, Germany
2011: Associate Professor with tenure, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park
2005-2011: Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park
2002-2005: Research Scientist, Department of Biology, Georgia State University, Atlanta
1999-2001: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Biology, Georgia State University, Atlanta
Link to Flyer: Jens Herberholz
What can drunken crayfish teach us about drugs, social experience, and neural mechanisms?
Professor Herberholz and his team at the University of Maryland are working on very interesting and groundbreaking research involving the study of alcohol. In his lab he is using crayfish as a model organism to study the acute effects of alcohol at the neural level. In his talk, he gave us an inside look at his research, the results that they have found thus far, and how these results might have a future impact. He began the talk with explaining why studying alcohol is important and why scientists don’t actually know that much about its mechanisms. He says that alcohol has a biphasic response; it is both a stimulant and a depressor. The neuronal mechanisms that accompany these phases is very complicated because the alcohol hijacks so many different neurotransmitter systems, including GABA and serotonin.
Professor Herberholz argues that crayfish can be used as a model organism for alcohol research for several reasons. The GABA circuit was actually first discovered in crayfish and has been extensively studied and proven to be very similar to the one in humans. Serotonin also affects crayfish in similar ways and plays a role in affecting aggressive behavior. Along with similar responses to these neurotransmitters, crayfish also respond to alcohol very similarly to humans and other mammals. They are first stimulated by alcohol and then as more time passes they become inhibited. Different levels of alcohol concentration also impact the extent to which these effects occur and when they are put back into a freshwater environment, they return to normal behavior just like a human who sobers up. Crayfish work as good models in science because they have relatively large neural fibers which makes them easy to study and run trials on.
In his research Dr. Herberholz uses two specific behaviors as indicators of alcohol intoxication; a tail-flip and belly-up position. Once they were able to strongly say that acute alcohol exposure in crayfish was comparable to other mammals, the researchers tested if the social history of individual crayfish affected the effects of alcohol exposure. To test this, they split the crayfish into two groups, communal and isolate. The isolates were placed in a tank alone for one week before testing and the researchers found that communal animals get drunk more quickly. They then tracked the cellular mechanisms during acute alcohol exposure of both of these subgroups and found that the threshold for tail-flips goes down dramatically in alcohol in both populations, but the quickest in communal crayfish. The overall results of these experiments is that social experience does affect the effects of acute alcohol exposure in crayfish based on the fact that behavioral responses and neuronal level changes were observed.
At the end of his talk Dr. Herberholz listed three main takeaway points that could potentially influence future alcohol education and prevention, intervention, and treatment. The three points were that 1) there is low sensitivity in isolates, which means that there is a higher dependence in socially excluded humans, 2) upon alcohol exposure there is tonic inhibition, which shows that this is a target area for alcohol in humans, and 3) Prozac may be able to be used for treatment of alcoholism in humans. Based on these three concluding points, Professor Herberholz explained the impact that these findings have and the future research that he plans to do to extend the knowledge in this area of neuroscience.