Brains are evolved to learn, enabling animals to respond flexibly to an unpredictable world and to draw on experience to guide future behaviors. To learn efficiently, brains need to balance a high degree of flexibility in the representation of the outside world with the limited neuronal infrastructure available to them. Focusing on the Drosophila melanogaster olfactory system, my research...
The European honeybee, Apis mellifera, is a favourable experimental model for investigating cross-modal sensory interactions, particularly olfactory-visual integration, at both the behavioural and neuronal levels. Such integration occurs in high-order processing centres called mushroom bodies (MB), which receive sensory information from primary olfactory and visual centres, the antennal and...
Animals adapt their behavior to meet changing internal needs, such as the requirement for specific nutrients to maintain homeostasis. While it is known that internal states like nutrient deprivation or reproductive status drive appetite for foods that are rich in particular nutrients, the neural mechanisms by which these needs shape behavior remain incompletely understood.
Building on our...
Hunger or malnutrition results in insufficient caloric intake, triggering profound physiological changes that can culminate in organ damage or death. To prevent this, organisms may engage in maladaptive food intake, consuming food sources that are normally avoided due to their poor quality or potential harm. However, the underlying neurophysiological and metabolic mechanisms that drive such a...
Specific olfactory receptors tune the sensitivity of chemoreception, enabling olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) to detect odours across a broad spectrum of intensities. In order to study additional mechanisms of odour-specific neuronal processing, we investigated OSN synapses in the Drosophila antennal lobe, the first relay station of the olfactory pathway. Here, we examined the structure and...
In nature, insects perceive and consolidate complex multisensory cues to elicit diverse behaviors. Our previous work using a classical conditioning paradigm shows that Drosophila melanogaster benefits from bimodal sensory integration when associating punishment signals with weakly learned olfactory and visual cues on a need-to basis. By adapting our behavioral paradigm to a physiological...
