Collaborative Research: Brain Metabolic Plasticity and Agression

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A key challenge in biology is to understand the link between brain function and behavior. Knowledge of brain functional dynamics is especially important for understanding how experience shapes the brain. This project couples state-of-the-art techniques to measure and mathematically model brain metabolic activity, using the honey bee as a model system and aggression as the focal behavior. Experiments will determine whether experimentally induced changes in brain metabolism cause changes in aggression, which is what is expected based on previously collected correlative data. Additional experiments will determine in which parts of the brain are the aggression-related changes in metabolic activity. This new information will then be used to build a comprehensive model of the bee brain's metabolic network, which will then be validated with experimental work. This collaborative project will provide integrative training for undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates, and members of the research team will give public presentations on the new insights into brain function gained by this project in a variety of venues for retired people and in K-12 settings. The Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be the facility to store and back up project data, which include mainly RNA bioinformatic sequence-based and metabolomic datasets.