Drosophila melanogaster

…Using the Drosophila melanogaster visual system, I will discuss our efforts to dissect how individuality in circuit wiring emerges during development, and how that helps generate individual behavioral variation.

…through the lens of flight control in Drosophila melanogaster. Underlying the extraordinary aerial agility of the fruit fly is mechanosensory feedback from the haltere, a reduced hindwing that acts as both a biological gyroscope and an adjustable clock to set the spike-timing of wing-steering motor neurons. Although the halter

…of the experimental tractability of Drosophila melanogaster to determine how neurons in its brain perform this computation. In the fly brain, directions are encoded as vectors in an allocentric reference frame by neurons in a region called the central complex. We investigated whet

To survive, organisms must make rapid inferences about their surroundings. For example, to successfully escape approaching predators, prey must estimate the direction of approach from noisy stimuli [1]. Such rapid inferences are particularly challenging because there is little time to gather sensory information, yet the precision of inference is critical for survival. Due to evolutionary pressures, nervous systems likely evolved effective computational strategies that enable accurate inferences under strong time limitations. Here, we aim to understand the principles underlying such rapid infe

…involved detailed video recordings of Drosophila melanogaster larvae, focusing on the effects

…to manipulate Nf1 levels in Drosophila melanogaster. Our study focused on assessing the functional alterations in the giant fiber system, a well-established electrophysiological model to study

…We have established the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as an easily scalable, highly tractable and genetically conserved platform to analyze nervous system regeneration. Particularly, by developing and implementing genetically-encoded lineage tracing systems, as well as molecular and ima

…we explore the outcome of Drosophila melanogaster brain development at hyper-gravity 10^2 to 10^3 times greater than conventional gravity on earth. Remarkably, Drosophila pupae ful

The circuitry underlying the detection of visual motion in Drosophila melanogaster is one of the best studied networks in neuroscience. Lately, electron microscopy reconstructions, algorithmic models, and functional studies have proposed a common motif for the cellular circuitry of an elementary motion detector based on both supralinear enhancement for preferred direction and sublinear suppression for null-direction motion. In T5 cells, however, all columnar input neurons (Tm1, Tm2, Tm4, and Tm9) are excitatory. So, how is null-direction suppression realized there? Using two-photon calcium ima

…In Drosophila melanogaster, a crucial ROS sensor in sleep-promoting dorsal fan-shaped body neurons (dFBNs) is the β-subunit, termed Hyperkinetic (Hk), of the voltage-gated potassium channel Shaker. Oxidation of a stably bound NADPH cofactor causes conformational changes in the channel, which increase dFBN activity. dFB

…Using Drosophila melanogaster, we investigated adult-onset tau expression effects on sleep, addressing the knowledge gap in tauopathy's impact on sleep-related changes in AD progression. Pan-neuronal expression of wild-type tau and pseudo-phosphorylated tau E14 in Drosophila was induced in adult flies by RU 486 and activity and sleep were monitored in an automated Drosophila Ac

…In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, dorsal fan-shaped body neurons (dFBNs) sit at the centre of homeostatic sleep control: the neurons’ excitability increases with sleep drive, and their artificial activation induces sleep. Despite significant advances in understanding of the molecular events that regulate the activity of dFBNs, insight into how they impose sleep on the organism is still lagging. By combining optogenetics and in vivo patch-clamp re

Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) pose a significant challenge to patients and their families, causing severe intellectual impairment, health complications and a diminished life expectancy. Yet, in approximately half of the affected individuals, the causal genetic variants remain elusive. Utilizing a comprehensive genetic screening strategy in a cohort of consanguineous families with multiple affected children, several gene variants associated with NDDs were identified. Among these, CLSTN1 emerged as a compelling candidate due to its high expression in the nervous system and high degree of c

…and high degree of conservation in Drosophila melanogast

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism in genetics that has contributed significantly to our current understanding of neurology and behavioural biology. Upon optogenetic stimulation of freely moving lilli189Y-Gal4 > UAS-CsChrimson larvae, we observed increased aggregation of larvae compared to wildtype controls. Interestingly, larvae furthermore showed excessive feeding, even if toxic concentrations of additives were present. This culminated in aggressive behaviour where larvae started to devour conspecifics in the absence of other organic media. Stereotyped behavioural o

The motion detection circuits within Drosophila melanogaster are amongst the best characterized and understood in circuit neuroscience. Visual information is processed in four retinotopically arranged neuropils called lamina, medulla, lobula and lobula plate. Within the visual processing stream, T4 and T5 cells are the first neurons which respond to motion in a directionally selective way. T4 cells respond preferentially to moving bright edges (ON-pathway), T5 cells to moving dark edges (OFF-pathway). Both T4 and T5 cells come in four subtypes (a,b,c,d), which encode one of the four cardinal d

…of the brain and body of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We now know the connectivity at single neuron resolution across the whole brain. How do we translate these new measurements into a deeper understanding of how the brain processes sensory information and produces behavior? I will describe two computational efforts to model the brain and the body of the fruit fly. First, I will describe a new modeling method which makes highly accurate predictions of neural activity in the fly visual system as measured in the l

Detecting the direction of image motion is important for visual navigation, predator avoidance and prey capture, and thus essential for the survival of all animals that have eyes. However, the direction of motion is not explicitly represented at the level of the photoreceptors: it rather needs to be computed by subsequent neural circuits, involving a comparison of the signals from neighboring photoreceptors over time. The exact nature of this process represents a classic example of neural computation and has been a longstanding question in the field. Much progress has been made in recent years

…encoding of locomotor statistics in Drosophila melanogaster. Analysis of walking trajectories following loss of an attractive food odor revealed multiple changes in locomotor statistics relative to baseline: a shift towards lower forward and higher an

Most animals evolved with bilateral symmetry. Yet, many behaviors, from tying shoelaces to playing sports, require asymmetric motions and frequent transitions between the use of different sides of the body. Sidedness (whether the movement is produced on the right or left side of the body) therefore constitutes a critical aspect of the behavior, in addition to the sequence of actions that compose a behavior. We do not know how neural circuits coordinate these two aspects of behavior in any system. To solve this problem, we take advantage of a quantifiable, yet complex behavior produced by Droso

Walking is a familiar but complex behavior, requiring the continuous coordination of multiple muscles while integrating proprioceptive feedback to correct for unanticipated disturbances. Although a variety of walking models propose mechanisms for this coordination, the neural computations proposed by these models have yet to be experimentally validated. Two crucial barriers are (1) gaps in modeling approaches that integrate specific neural dynamics with realistic kinematics to connect predictions to observations and (2) the inherent difficulty in perturbing or recording from neurons during wal

Are there a set of basic operations that are used as building blocks of computation in the brain? If so, what are these operations? An ideal paradigm for studying this question is 2D path integration: the task of keeping track of one's spatial position over time through incremental addition of displacement vectors. Path integration is a compelling computation to study in that there are many constraints in how one can break it down into simpler operations. Moreover, small-brained organisms like bees, ants, and fruit flies with tractable nervous systems seem able to implement this computation (H

An important problem in systems neuroscience is to understand how animals transform complex, high-dimensional sensory inputs into neural signals that drive behavior. Here we propose a novel modeling approach for this sensorimotor transformation to identify a one-to-one mapping between real and model neurons. Our approach involves training a deep neural network to produce behavioral data from a range of different inactivation experiments. Crucially, we train the model while perturbing its hidden units with the same perturbations applied to neural activity—a process we call ‘knockout’ training.

…fraction of the central brain of adult Drosophila melanogaster with high spatiotemporal resolution while flies engaged in a variety of behaviors, including running, grooming and flailing. This revealed neural representations of behavior on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The activity of most neurons across the brain correlated (or, in some cases, anticorrelated) with running and flailing over timescales that ranged from sec