Speaker
Description
Odor-driven innate behaviors dictate an animal’s survival and reproduction. Drosophila females exhibit genetically driven, stereotyped behaviors in response to the male-produced pheromone 11-cis-Vaccenyl Acetate (cVA). This pheromone innately guides mating, aggregation, and other crucial social behaviors and is conserved across several Drosophila species. Our initial behavior experiments suggest that classical olfactory conditioning can overwrite the valence of highly ecologically relevant chemical cues such as cVA. We propose that recurrent connections between olfactory neuropils, which harbor innate (Lateral horn) and learned (Mushroom body) memory processing, mediate these modulations in behavior. By the help of transgenic binary expression systems, split-gal4 lines, two-photon calcium imaging techniques, and the connectomic datasets, we trace this narrowly-tuned olfactory circuit that detects cVA and investigate possible connections via Projection neurons (PNs), Mushroom body output neurons (MBONs), and Lateral horn neurons (LHNs) to establish the complex circuits that integrate learning into hardwired representations governing the insect’s response to a stimulus. All our experiments are conducted in female Drosophila melanogaster.
