[Lfm] Seminar of interest

[Arantza Barrios]

Dear fly community,

Please let me know if you would like to speak with Carolina when she visits UCL next week.

Thanks,
Arantza


Arantza Barrios, Associate Professor
Year 2  Tutor Biomedical Sciences BSc
University College London
Dept. Cell and Developmental Biology
Anatomy Building, 2nd Floor, Room 202d
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT
a.barrios at ucl.ac.uk<mailto:a.barrios at ucl.ac.uk>
https://www.barrioslab.org


On 15 Sep 2026, at 16:43, Marc Amoyel <marc.amoyel at ucl.ac.uk<mailto:marc.amoyel at ucl.ac.uk>> wrote:

Dear all,
I thought this upcoming seminar in our department could be of interest to some of you:



Please join us a CDB Special Seminar by Dr Carolina Rezaval<https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/biosciences/rezaval-carolina> of the University of Birmingham.



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Decoding Competition in the Brain
Thursday, 1st October 1:00pm-2:00pm
Venue: G08 Sir David Davies LT, Roberts Building (accessibility guide<https://www.accessable.co.uk/ucl/access-guides/roberts-building-sir-david-davies-lecture-theatre-g08>)



Competition is a key evolutionary force that drives organisms to exceptional performance in pursuit of critical goals such as food and mates. Yet it can also promote excessive risk-taking and maladaptive choices. Despite its ubiquitous role in nature and human society, we still lack a mechanistic account of how the presence of rivals (‘competitive pressure’) is translated into changes in decision-making. Here, we harness the experimental power of the fruit fly Drosophila to elucidate how neural networks balance risk and reward under competitive pressure. We show that males exposed to rivals persist in courting females despite visual threats. This risk-taking behaviour requires prior social experience, implicating lasting changes in decision-making circuits. By combining our behavioural assay with neurogenetics, connectomics and a pioneering live imaging system to track neural activity in courting males under visual threats and rivals, we uncover a neural mechanism that integrates competitive cues with experience-dependent signals to steer decisions during this sex–survival conflict. Our findings reveal how social pressure recalibrates motivation and biases high-stakes behavioural choice at cellular and circuit levels.



Host: Arantza Barrios and Marc Amoyel



Best wishes,

Marc.

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