The Institute of Experimental Medicine ASCR in Prague

ENI-PRAGUE is located at the Institute of Experimental Medicine (IEM), Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (ASCR) in Prague. Presently, four Young Investigator groups are working in the Institute, two of them in newly established departments (the Dept. of Molecular Pharmacology and the Dept. of Tissue Culture and Stem Cells) and two in the established laboratories of the Dept. of Neuroscience and the Dept. of Auditory Neuroscience.

There are approximately 20 established scientists active in various fields of Cellular and Molecular Neurosciences in the IEM, with extensive collaboration with the European neuroscience community, in addition to 10 full-time Ph.D. students currently working in the four departments. ENI-PRAGUE scientists are partners in three FP6 projects currently under contract, while Prof. Eva Sykova, the mentor of three of the Young Investigators, serves as the coordinator of a Marie Curie Training Site established in collaboration with the Second Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague. Many of the Institute’s scientists also cooperate in an international Advanced Doctoral Program in the Neurosciences, in collaboration with Charles University.

The Young Investigator groups have access to state-of-the-art equipment at the IEM such as a Leica two-photon confocal microscope, Leica and Zeiss image analysis systems, a Phillips electron microscope, a Brooker 4.7 Tesla spectrometer specially equipped for animal experiments, a 1.5 Tesla Siemens Vision whole-body fNMR system, a Becton-Dickinson FACS sorter, a tissue culture laboratory, and a variety of experimental systems for electrophysiological and diffusion studies.

The groups have developed particular expertise in magnetic resonance imaging, the use of stem cells and biopolymer hydrogels in the treatment of nervous tissue injury and degeneration, the real-time iontophoretic method of diffusion analysis, pre- and postsynaptic patch-clamp recordings of receptor activity, antibody development, and yeast two-hybrid systems.