Devises a robot that uses navigation algorithms inspired by ants, aiming at a low-power solution to spatial navigation through a leafy, highly self-similar yet unstable environment, guided by a measure of familiarity. And with event-based cameras which far more faithfully model biological vision and which facilitates object separation and spatio-temporal tracking in the visual field.
"whenever I find a paper I don't understand, I start looking for the PhD thesis based on it. Nine times out of ten, the thesis is vastly more understandable: "obvious" lemmas will have explicit proofs, algorithms will have detailed pseudocode, and the right intuitions and perspectives to take about the topic will be spelled out."
Can relate. A colleague of mine, Stefan Pulver, once mentioned to me the "strategic reserve of Michael Bate's lab PhD student theses" as something of wonder – he was a postdoc in that lab. Huge amounts of data not deemed splashy enough for publication but full of details and caveats and protocols for studies of #Drosophila larvae #neuroscience.
Reviews both the adult and larval Drosophila brain circuits for feeding, sugar sensing, and associative memory, including the roles of neuromodulators and neuropeptides.
Open postdoc position at Paris-Saclay Neuroscience Institute, in Prof. Claire Eachbach's lab. Learn all about learning and memory in #Drosophila from one of the most knowledgeable and rigorous neuroscientists in the learning field, and who also has impressive statistical chops.
Start date January 2024, for two years. #neuroscience#postdoc
Fruit fly neuroscience is on fire. Earlier in the year we saw this:
"Hierarchical architecture of dopaminergic circuits enables second-order conditioning in Drosophila" by Yamada et al. 2023 (Aso's group) https://elifesciences.org/articles/79042
"The Drosophila mushroom body comprises a series of dopaminergic compartments, each of which exhibits distinct memory dynamics. We find that a slow and stable memory compartment can serve as an effective ‘teacher’ by instructing other faster and transient memory compartments via a single key interneuron", SMP108.
In larval brain parlance, neuron SMP108 is an FB2N: a second-order feedback neuron, meaning, it is the second hop of the 2-hop polysynaptic pathway from MBONs to DANs. See Eschbach et al. 2020 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-0607-9
"Neural circuit mechanisms for transforming learned olfactory valences into wind-oriented movement" by Aso and Hige and collaborators, 2023 https://elifesciences.org/articles/85756
"we identified a cluster of neurons postsynaptic to the mushroom body output neurons (MBONs) that can trigger robust upwind steering. These UpWind Neurons (UpWiNs) integrate inhibitory and excitatory synaptic inputs from MBONs of appetitive and aversive memory compartments, respectively."
These are, again in larval parlance, convergence neurons (CNs), and this neuron type integrate not only inputs from opposing compartments of the mushroom body, but also inputs from innate pathways (via lateral horn) of opposing valences, as shown in Eschbach et al. 2021 https://elifesciences.org/articles/62567 These CNs where also described by Dolan et al. 2018 (Jefferis lab) in the adult fly https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30244885/
(Claire Eschbach had the data in 2016 already, but it took 5 years to publish: child bearing, lab move to the UK, pandemic, and a relentless drive for rigorous data. She is extraordinary; now runs a lab at the Institut des Neurosciences Paris‑Saclay.)
Q for my fellow neuroscience peeps. Is there a way to stabilize the expression of cre if its under the control of a promoter that is active only transiently during development?
Is it possible to cross a cre line with a cre-dependent cre-expressing reporter mouse so that cre become permanently expressed in the population of interest, and amenable for e.g. virus injection in the adult?
Really excited to share the lab's first Drosophila paper and it's a big one. Check out our preprint https://shorturl.at/gqrvO where we present the complete neural connectome of an animal circadian clock . 🧵 (1/8) #Drosophila#neuroscience#connectome
In ##Drosophila, this is what we are working on. Understanding, in a limited but detailed fashion, what goes on within each brain region, and then, how all these come together to implement a joint multisensory transformation plus memory to drive behaviour. On the basis of the now known connectome, computational models, single cell-type genetic driver lines plus optophysiology, and automated behavioural experiments, it seems feasible.
@PessoaBrain
second to @albertcardona
we are traditionally more a reductionist since Benzer time, but that is not to say when the data show that cross neuropile communication Drosophilist woudl ignore it :)
a new paper reporting overall neural network activity just out: https://botsin.space/@flypapers/111050705752644343
again pushing the advance on this question by this small brain of #Drosophila @cogneurophys
James W. Truman featured in the New Yorker. A warm, lovely piece on his career studying insect metamorphosis, from moths to flies and mosquitoes, and the role and impact of hormones on insect development and behaviour—motivated by his latest work mapping the fate of neurons from larva to adult through pupal stages, and addressing an old question: do associative memories persist through metamorphosis?
The paper:
“Metamorphosis of memory circuits in Drosophila reveals a strategy for evolving a larval brain” Truman et al. 2023 https://elifesciences.org/articles/80594
Mubarak Syed kicking off the #pbsscb grounding us in the land and the history and the rich diversity of the Pueblo of Sandia. https://www.pueblobrainscience.org absolutely tremendous outreach efforts bringing in and supporting tomorrow’s scientists.
Jim Truman leads with #metamorphosis of the #Drosophila mushroom body (a locus of memory). He's walking us through a most beautiful piece of work. Special shout-out to the foresight it took to begin this work before there was a #connectome available so as to inform ongoing work.
tl;dr the molecular events that shape larval development can fade, allowing trans-differentiation of neurons (a shift from one brain area to another).
"Lineage-based dissection of neural circuit formation and behavior" new PI Haluk Lacin from #UMKC.
The talk starts off with a pretty compelling point: #Drosophila can do a heck of a lot of things if you remove their heads!
...so it's really motivating to think about how you build a ventral nerve cord (the fly equivalent of the vertebrate spinal cord). There are developmentally-specified populations of neurons that flies need to escape from looming stimuli (like a swatter).
Here comes Josie Clowney from UMich on
"Hacking brain devleopment to test models of sensory coding"
Bringing us back to the #Drosophila#mushroom body with an open question: how do the programs that specify neuronal fate produce cells with particular computational structures (patterns of inputs). This is important b/c different numbers of neurons and numbers of inputs ultimately determine how neurons work.
Cool finding. The seven-up gene has been known to the #Drosophila neuro-developmental biology field for quite some time. Here is an early paper from 1990:
I was frantically searching for the effect of fly food on behaviour and came across Katrin's (@katvogt) ResearchGate comments reminding me this paper from Heisenberg lab in the 90s: https://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/3/1/49
Describing an effect of #diet on visually guided learning in #drosophila
"Most important, poor nutrition causes complete amnesia within three or four generations. The reverse shift from poor to nutritious food restores learning ability with an even longer delay."
Interesting insight on extra-genomic contributions to neural circuit architecture:
"we demonstrate that our predicted circuit can emerge naturally using Hebbian plasticity, which means the neural connectivity does not need to be explicitly encoded in the genetic program of the insect but rather can emerge during development."
And particularly:
"we now address another question: whether there might be a reason that insect head direction circuits typically have an eight-column architecture [...] powers of two are easier to generate with replication dynamics than other numbers, because they just require each cell to divide a set number of times."
"The circuits for N = 2 and N = 4 are degenerate – either producing a single dimensional encoding, or two disconnected circuits that do not enforce the required circular topology. N = 8 is the smallest power of two that could result in a non-degenerate circuit. This hints at the possibility that the eight-column architecture is not a chance evolutionary artefact, but rather that it is the genetically simplest circuit capable of performing heading integration."
"Volume EM: a quiet revolution takes shape" – a review and commentary by Lucy Collinson et al. 2023 on present and future electron microscopy technology and its application https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-01861-8
Following from Collinson's paper, here is my take on scaling up volume electron microscopy for connectomics in the #UK or any country willing to commit about 10 to 20 million a year:
The “brain” sells, the nerve cord pays the bills. Not in vain we started from the nerve cord with the #Drosophila larva: so that we could interpret the sensory first order network in light of the known stimuli, and mutatis mutandis with the nearby premotor circuits.
When we entered the brain, first order of business was sorting out inputs (antennal lobe, optic lobe) and outputs (descending neurons, command neurons). Only then we could go for the brain proper with any chance of making sense of it.
Hence the golden opportunity of working with the gecko: one can potentially include retina, cochlea and a good chunk of spinal cord.