[Lfm] Fwd: Fly learning&memory talk on 12th September

[kofan]

Dear all,



We would like to invite you to a talk from our visitor, Stanislav Ott, from
the Adam Claridge-Chang lab in Singapore. (
http://www.claridgechang.net/people.html)



*Talk title: *

Conditioned odor avoidance in Drosophila requires a state of arousal

*Abstract:*

Learning and memory are an integral part of the human experience. Over the
years researchers have identified the key components of Drosophila
olfactory learning machinery: where the olfactory information is processed
and how this information is integrated into memory. By contrast, our
understanding of how non-olfactory sensory information and the internal
state of the animal could shape the behavioral responses remains limited.
My results show that, to display conditioned odor avoidance, Drosophila
require a heightened state of arousal. Omitting mechanical agitation during
olfactory conditioning suppressed odor avoidance, even though subsequent
agitation revealed that associative learning was intact. Drosophila
subjected to mechanosensory, temperature or starvation stress displayed a
profound change in fly behaviour throughout conditioning. For example,
flies subjected to these stimuli visited the odor choice area more often
and displayed more attempts to actively avoid the punished odor area.
Manipulating the arousal levels of Drosophila via optogenetics was
sufficient to elicit or impair conditioned odor avoidance. Broad activation
of mechanosensory neurons before testing produced a robust odor avoidance
response in the absence of external arousal. By contrast, sparse activation
of mechanosensory neurons only increased fly activity but did not elicit
conditioned odor avoidance. In summary, these results show that arousal is
a precondition for the display of a learned odor avoidance response in
Drosophila



The talk will take place at *1:45 pm at UCL Queen Square site on Thursday
12th September*.



Please find attached map for the access to the venue



Stanislav will be in the UCL campus for the afternoon, if you are
interested in talking to him please get in touch directly or let me know so
we can arrange accordingly.

All the best

Kofan on behalf of Jepson lab
Ko-Fan Chen PhD
Research Associate
Jepson Laboratory
UCL Institute of Neurology
Queen Square House
WC1N 3RX London

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