Mapping Neural Networks in the Fly

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• Gregory Jefferis, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB)
• Tuesday 13 December 2011, 11:00-12:00
• Sir William Hardy Building on Downing Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mikail Rubinov.

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.

This talk is part of the Brain Mapping Unit Networks Meeting and the Cambridge Connectome Consortium series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Brain Mapping Unit Networks Meeting and the Cambridge Connectome Consortium
• Department of Psychiatry talks stream
• Sir William Hardy Building on Downing Site

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