@PessoaBrain @cogneurophys

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.

To my fly colleagues. I once heard this story, which might be apocryphal, and therefore I am asking for confirmation. The name of the gene #decapentaplegic (#Dpp) when it was for found in #Drosophila, is a misnomer. According to the mutant phenotype, the correct name should be #pentadecaplegic. ???

Congrats to Megan and @DarrenObbard

Great work on naturally ocurring viruses in #Drosophila that is sorely needed! Far less attention paid to natural pathogens in fly immunity research, and this opens a lot of interesting avenues to explore with in-depth characterisation of host-virus interactions within D. melanogaster, but also across relevant virus host species and all sorts of combinations! Great stuff!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.05.555738v1

After a brief hiatus from this place, I’m elated to announce WE HAVE A NEW PUB, Y’ALL 🔥🚨🔥🚨 !!!! 1/n #neuroscience #neuropeptides #neuromodulation #drosophila #connectomics #physiology https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41012-3

@flypapers

Up to now I thought only smarter insects like wasps (Tibbetts et al. 2020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220307405 ) could remember who won or lost battles and act submissive or aggressively, accordingly:

"Male eavesdroppers were then less likely to attack observed contest winners than males without social information."

Interestingly, males don't care that females observe them while they fight, and females don't care at all:

"Female eavesdroppers did not elicit any change in the aggression of the two males, and female eavesdroppers did not use social information to inform their mating decisions."

From: Hitchins and Saltz 2023 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.01.555942v1

#Drosophila #behaviour #neuroscience

Wenn das #Labor nebenan mit #Drosophila arbeitet: ...

Manche bekommen ihre Negativergebnisse auch in @Nature publiziert. So etwa Henrik Mouritsen von der @UniOldenburg: Jahrelang beobachtete er über 100.000 #Drosophila-Fliegen – einen Magnetsinn, wie zuvor publiziert, konnte er bei ihnen nicht bestätigen…

— Andrea Pitzschke fasst die Erknntnisse für uns zusammen: 👉 https://www.laborjournal.de/editorials/2827.php

@knutson_brain @arstechnica
@done
Even fruit flies have two status of sleep
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220316584

Also recently it was also shown fruit flies micro-move their eye
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05317-5
So it would be really interesting to see if the paradoxical sleep in fruit flies indeed also coincides with eye movement?
#sleep #drosophila

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?

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/what-insects-go-through-is-even-weirder-than-we-thought

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

#neuroscience #entomology #metamorphosis #insects #ecdyzone #Drosophila #moths #mosquitoes #NewYorker

#drosophila #entomology Jim Truman interview
https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/what-insects-go-through-is-even-weirder-than-we-thought

@schoppik

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:

“The Drosophila seven-up gene, a member of the steroid receptor gene superfamily, controls photoreceptor cell fates” by Mlodzik et al. 1990 (Gerry Rubin’s lab)
https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/0092-8674(90)90737-Y.pdf

Orchestrating cell fate in the nervous system seems to be a conserved role of seven-up wherever it pops up.

#neuroscience #DevBio

@MCDuncanLab @askennard
My personal experience: after back to back sessions between stereoscope #drosophila head dissection and confocal microscope all day(circa 2018, I don't do this anymore), I was limping the next day...perhaps not slip disc but sciatic pain..that was bad enough

A nice review on maternal-to-zygotic transition (#MZT) in #Drosophila
https://academic.oup.com/genetics/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/genetics/iyad142/7250177
#DevBio

Also as we are on the topic, which of the two recipes are most similar to your fly lab supplies? #drosophila

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."

@albertcardona @flypapers
Paralysis aside, shibrie (shi) expresses beyond neuromuscular junction #NMJ so the specificity claimed here is also needed to revisit. #drosophila

@flypapers

“Inducing muscle inactivity in shi larvae at 300C yielded” … roasted larvae? Nice typo.

Shi: shibire temperature-sensitive, which gets inactivated at 30C. Well, also at 300C, but for other obvious reasons.

#Drosophila

@tuthill

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.

"The insect compass system: From theory to circuitry" by Vilimelis et al. 2023 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.05.547838v2

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."

#neuroscience #Drosophila #CentralComplex

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:

"Growing and nurturing a research base in connectomics"
https://albert.rierol.net/tell/20230823_connectomics_research_base.html

From the humble #Drosophila to the #mouse brain, passing through the mosquito, honeybee, gecko lizards and the Etruscan shrew.

It's possible, it's feasible, it's timely: therefore we must.

#neuroscience #connectomics #VolumeEM #vEM