Tomoko Ohyama: Action selection in a small brain (Drosophila maggot)
Theme:
Insects
What:
Talk
When:
9:00 AM, Friday 29 Jun 2018
(1 hour 30 minutes)
Where:
Université du Québec à Montréal
- DS-R510
Tomoko Ohyama (Speaker)
Professor McGill University
Professor McGill University
Jonathan Balcombe
Independent Scientist and Author
Independent Scientist and Author
Moderator
To make optimal decisions and adapt successfully to our environments, we need to make use of all the sensory cues we can detect (e.g., visual, olfactory, tactile, noxious), which initially arrive through selective channels. A central question in neuroscience concerns how nervous systems transform these originally segregated inputs into holistic multisensory representations, and how they use these representations to guide the selection of actions. Our research is focused on discovering the fundamental circuit principles that underlie these processes. To tackle this challenge, we have been studying escape behaviors in larval Drosophila melanogaster.
Ohyama, T., Schneider-Mizell, C. M., Fetter, R. D., Aleman, J. V., Franconville, R., Rivera-Alba, M., ... & Cardona, A. (2015). A multilevel multimodal circuit enhances action selection in Drosophila. Nature, 520(7549), 633.
Vogelstein, J. T., Park, Y., Ohyama, T., Kerr, R. A., Truman, J. W., Priebe, C. E., & Zlatic, M. (2014). Discovery of brainwide neural-behavioral maps via multiscale unsupervised structure learning. Science, 344(6182), 386-392.
Ohyama, T., Jovanic, T., Denisov, G., Dang, T. C., Hoffmann, D., Kerr, R. A., & Zlatic, M. (2013). High-throughput analysis of stimulus-evoked behaviors in Drosophila larva reveals multiple modality-specific escape strategies. PloS one, 8(8), e71706.
