Constance Scharff

Biography

Constance Scharff (born 13 August 1959 ) is a German zoologist and neurobiologist and behavioral biologist. She is a university lecturer at the Freie Universität Berlin .Scharff earned her high school diploma in Lübeck and from 1979 studied biology at the University of Marburg. From 1982 onwards, she studied at Adelphi University, where she turned to experimental neurobiology and behavioral research at Carol Diakow. From 1984 onwards, she became a Ph.D. student at Fernando Nottebohm at Rockefeller University, who first demonstrated by the example of the learning of bird singing that adults also form new neurons when learning. In 1991, she was promoted to Nottebohm and went to Paris as a postdoctoral student at the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Embryology (College de France), where she studied gender differences in the brain of chickens, and then returned to Nottebohm at Rockefeller University in New York, where she became assistant professor in 1994. From 2001, she was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, before becoming a professor of behavioral biology at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005.

Research Interest

Research interest: Do special “human” genes provide the biological substrate for uniquely human traits, such as language? Genetic aberrations of the human FoxP2 gene impair speech production and comprehension, yet the relative contributions of FoxP2 to brain development and function are unknown. Songbirds are a useful model to address this because, like human youngsters, they learn to vocalize by imitating the sounds of their elders. Previously, we found that when young zebra finches learn to sing or when adult canaries change their song seasonally, FoxP2 is up-regulated in Area X, a brain region important for song plasticity. We recently reduced FoxP2 levels in Area X before zebra finches started to learn their song, using virus-mediated RNA interference for the first time in songbird brains. Birds with experimentally lowered levels of FoxP2 imitated their tutor's song imprecisely and sang more variably than controls. FoxP2 thus appears to be critical for proper song development. These results suggest that humans and birds may employ similar molecular substrates for vocal learning, which can now be further analyzed in an experimental animal system.  We are currently functionally characterizing FoxP2 on the molecular level in vitro and in the living animal using the lentiviral expression.