Abstract

My lab studies the processing of odours in the fruit fly. We are trying to understand how raw sensory information is transformed into a representation that can trigger appropriate behaviour. We are combining in vivo electrophysiology with detailed neuroanatomical work to reconstruct the relevant neural circuits down to the level of individual neurons. Much of our recent work has focussed on the circuits processing sex pheromones, and particularly on sites of circuit dimorphism; these could explain why male and female flies show different behavioural responses to the same pheromone.

I will provide some background for the problems that we are studying and then review some of the techniques that we use for mapping. I will then show how we have been applying these techniques to large scale data, consisting of >100 groups of developmentally related neurons or ~16000 individual neurons from across the whole fly brain. These data provide the opportunity to examine network connectivity across the fly brain and ask whether there are conserved organisational principles that span brain networks studied by techniques with very different resolution.