MNEMOSMELL

Unraveling the mechanisms of odor coding and sent-tracking in Drosophila larvae

 Partecipanti

Mappa

 Word cloud

Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.

 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'To survive and prosper, any motile organism must extract relevant cues from its external environment and convert them into coherent internal representations. Responses elicited by the flow of internal representations form the basis of adaptive behaviours. The overall goal of this project is to elucidate how olfactory signalling and behavioural decisions emerge from the integration of molecular and cellular interactions. Despite the relatively good anatomical characterisation of insect and vertebrate olfactory systems, little is known about the neural basis of odour percept formation and their processing in the brain. We will address this problem in the simple and genetically tractable system of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) larva. An odorant stimulus can be specified by three variables: odour quality, odour intensity and time of occurrence. To chemotax, larvae are able to reliably perceive and integrate changes relative to these variables by using noisy detectors. We aim at identifying and functionally characterising the peripheral and central neuronal circuits involved in larval chemotaxis. A cross-disciplinary approach will be adopted to combine the power of fly molecular genetics, state-of-the-art engineering, electrophysiology and computational modelling to determine: how odour intensity is represented by the peripheral sensory neurons; where intensities measured at different times are stored and subsequently compared and whether the design principles of the larval olfactory system allow noise filtering. Clarifying how an elementary nervous system solves these fundamental questions will increasing our understanding of the relationships between neuronal circuits in the brain and behaviour.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

By studying how fruit fly larvae respond to different smells, scientists in Europe hope to gain insight into how the human brain functions.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Smell is an underrated yet very important sense. While a good deal of research has been performed in this field, we still do not completely understand how different smells are processed and stored by the brain.

Since the human brain is so complex, it makes sense to initially study these aspects in simpler organisms. The EU-funded Mnemosmell project targeted the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster to unravel the mechanisms of odour coding and scent tracking.

Mnemosmell is a team of experts in electrophysiology, molecular genetics, behavioural analysis and computational modelling. They are focusing on the process of chemotaxis, which drives an organism's movement in response to chemicals in the surrounding environment.

In order to gather information about how the olfactory system chooses a direction based on input signals, a new electrophysiological laboratory set-up has been created. New software to analyse the behaviour of the fruit fly larvae is also being developed.

Mnemosmell and other research projects supported by EU funding are helping us unravel the considerable mystery of how the brain works. Applications in the biomedical world are set to include the development of therapies for neurological damage to the central nervous system.