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Start of funding 01.01.2021
Imaging the brain in action – establishing tools for the large-scale investigation of sensorimotor processing in behaving animals
Dr. Jan M. Ache
University of Würzburg
Biozentrum Universität Würzburg
Prof. Dr. Mark Frye
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology
Neuronal information processing is context-dependent, extremely fast, and happening on a massive, parallel scale. Achieving a mechanistic understanding of the nervous system therefore requires recording the activity of large neuronal populations with high temporal resolution and analyzing how this parallel activity changes in the context of behavioral action selection. Our project aims to achieve this by pushing the limits of dual-color two-photon calcium imaging in behaving flies (Drosophila melanogaster). This powerful method will allow us to simultaneously record from large populations of neurons in the visual and olfactory system, and from descending neurons, which connect the brain to downstream motor circuits, while exposing flies to different, multimodal sensory stimuli. Thus, we will investigate how information is routed from the visual and olfactory periphery into different descending motor pathways in various contexts and behavioral states. In combination with the unparalleled genetic toolkit available in Drosophila, this approach has the potential to deepen our understanding of context-dependent neuronal processing and action selection by the nervous system.