Function and plasticity of neural circuits in Drosophila

我们的大脑对世界没有直接的经验。相反，我们的感知是由动作电位流构成的，动作电位流是由数百万个神经细胞携带的电信号，它们共同构成了外部世界的内部表征，关于世界的信息是如何被分解成碎片并编码在数百万个神经元的同时活动中的？这些碎片是如何重新组合成一幅连贯的画面的？信息编码、传递、存储和解码的细胞机制是什么？神经活动的模式与我们的感知有什么关系？神经集合体携带的信息是如何读出和解释的，从而为行为提供信息？为了解决这些问题，我们同时进行遗传，生理和行为实验的模式生物，果蝇。具体来说，我们研究嗅觉，苍蝇？的嗅觉。当在环境中导航时，昆虫在很大程度上依赖于气味：气味会引起吸引和回避，进食和求偶的复杂行为;气味会被记忆并与其他环境线索联系起来，以反映动物的方式？他对世界的独特认知。调节这些功能的嗅觉系统在结构上与包括我们自己在内的高等生物非常相似，但它包含的细胞要少得多。我们的目标是了解，在机械细节，如何这个相对简单的神经系统？与类似的脊椎动物系统中的数百万个细胞相比，神经细胞不超过5,000个。工程.

Our brains have no direct experience of the world. Rather, our perceptions are constructed from streams of action potentials, electrical signals carried by millions of nerve cells, which together form an internal representation of the external world.How is information about the world broken into pieces and encoded in the simultaneous activities of millions of neurons? How are the pieces reassembled into a coherent picture? What are the cellular mechanisms underlying information coding, transfer, storage, and decoding? How are patterns of neural activity related to what we perceive? And how is information carried by neural ensembles read out and interpreted so as to inform behaviour?To address these issues, we perform simultaneous genetic, physiological, and behavioural experiments on a model organism, the fruit fly. Specifically, we study olfaction, the fly?s sense of smell. When navigating their environment, insects rely heavily on odors: odors elicit complex behaviours of attraction and avoidance, feeding and courtship; odors are memorized and associated with other environmental cues, in ways that reflect an animal?s unique acquired knowledge of the world. The olfactory system mediating these functions is remarkably similar in structure to that of higher organisms, including our own, but it contains many fewer cells. Our goal is to understand, in mechanistic detail, how this relatively simple neural system ? comprising not more than 5,000 nerve cells, as compared to the many millions of cells in analogous vertebrate systems ? works.