Investigating the role of individual dopaminergic reward neurons for locomotion

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The most important achievement is the publication of our novel behavioural tracking software that we are using. The manuscript has been accepted now and will be published within the next days. This publication includes the original experiments on which this project is based on and new experiments that were not finished at the time of the proposal. This also means that our novel software that we will used throughout the project is fully ready and all further behavioural analyses can be completed speedily.We established the working setups and the basic experiments in our new lab in Sapporo. Also, we recruited an undergraduate and a Master student. All of these efforts took a bit longer than expected, but now we are ready for all planned experiments.The Master student already started experiments testing for the molecular basis of the observed locomotion phenotypes. Towards this end, we decided to first employ a drug treatment to inhibit the production of dopamine, before investigating individual dopamine receptors. The first results look very promising.Also, we started to check the first Parkinson's disease fly models for behavioural and anatomical phenotypes.