@flypapers

Dissecting neural circuits for cold nociception in the #Drosophila larva, by Atit Patel in D. Cox lab: http://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.31.551339v1

Atit was a visitor of my former lab at #HHMIJanelia. Took years to map the circuit, identify GAL4 lines, design and run behavioral assays and make sense of it all. Atit, a PhD student, did all the mapping and all the experiments and wrote most of the paper, and did a great job at it.

For the insiders: this is about class III md (multidendritic) somatosensory neurons in the fly larva, and their synaptic connectivity, primarily onto various Basin neurons (Ohyama, Schneider-Mizell et al. 2015 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14297 , Jovanic, Schneider-Mizell et al. et al. 2016 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416312429 ) but also other neurons such as Down-and-Back (Burgos et al. 2018 https://elifesciences.org/articles/26016 ) and PNs of the class IV mds (Gerhard et al. 2017 https://elifesciences.org/articles/29089 ).

In other words, how somatosensoty neurons for cold nociception (class III mds) feed into the local circuits that process nociception (class IV mds) and mechanoreception (chordotonals).

Note this work is unrelated to how the larva senses and responds to cold and warm stimuli (Hernandez-Nunez et al. 2021 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.abg6707 )

#neuroscience #nociception #connectomics

From p120, there begins a discussion on #nociception - "sensing harmful stimuli", as distinct from #pain, defined as "the experience of suffering that ensues". (Not all nociception is sent to the brain). On p126 we meet the question of what an animal's experience of pain is, what parts of the brain are involved? How many neurons are needed to experience pain? Relevant for #animal welfare, since "many small brained animals outperform our expectations of them [in this regard]".

My #introduction. I run a small not-for profit research organization that depends on writing grants and publishing papers for its success. I guess you call that a #laboratory and I’m the PI. We study somatosensation, primarily in the #drosophila larva. Our main focus has been on pain and #nociception. We also study parasitoid wasps and larval defenses against them. I’m also into #cycling and #sailing and I once did a #seabattical in the #Caribbean. Current post is at #IndianaUniversity.