Comparative Approaches for the Study of Somatosensory Processing in Drosophila

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how the brain creates an internal representation of the sensory world, and how the coordinated activity of neurons and circuits transforms this representation into simple actions and behaviors. To get at these questions, neuroscientists rely heavily on a small set of model organisms such as C. elegans, Drosophila, and mice. These provide the advantage of excellent experimental access owing to their sophisticated neurogenetic techniques and facile propagation in the laboratory. Yet, an unintended consequence of this focus is that most of what we know about sensory representation comes from a very limited number of species—a few vertebrate and invertebrate model animals that are adapted to live in moderate conditions favorable to humans, like those of a common laboratory. The goal of this proposal is to establish the desert-dwelling fly Drosophila mojavensis as a new model system to study the cellular and molecular mechanisms behind sensory adaptations to environmental conditions such as extreme heat and dry air. The work proposed involves the application of genome editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9- mediated knockouts and transgenesis to study principles of thermo- and hygro-sensory processing in this species. Comparing the organization of sensory circuits in this desert-dwelling fly to those of the common laboratory fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will lead to a greater understanding of the conserved principles behind temperature/humidity sensing and preference behavior, and help reveal the evolutionary forces that shape an animal’s ability to colonize new environmental niches. In general, increasing the diversity of the model systems we study will proportionally increase our understanding of how sensory systems evolve, reveal conserved principles of sensory processing, and ultimately help us better extrapolate results we obtain in animal studies to the human nervous system, in both normal and disease states.