Speaker
Description
Organisms rely on multi-sensory integration to perform appropriate behaviours. A powerful example of this is the insect leg gustatory system, where knowledge about the quality and the location of a tastant is important. However, we do not currently know how these distinct information streams are integrated. To investigate the possible existence of a dual chemosensory and topographic map, we study the Drosophila melanogaster leg – a unique sensory organ on which chemosensory and mechanosensory sensilla overlap. We propose that Drosophila leg chemosensory neurons are able to convey both the location and the quality of a tastant. First, we are performing thermogenetic experiments to determine whether such maps exist, followed by using clonal labelling tools and connectomics to understand how these maps might be organised. From this, we see segregation of chemosensory neuron projections from different leg compartments, along with morphologies that correlate with the receptor identity of a taste neuron. Put together, our work is aiming to uncover how the anatomy and receptor identity of sensory neurons are used to convey different types of information to downstream circuits.
