What the Fly Can Tell Us about the Neural Basis of Navigation

Presented on November 12, 2018 at 11:15 a.m. in the Krone Engineered Biosystems Building, Room 1005.Vivek Jayaraman studied to be an aerospace engineer, and spent a few fun years developing numerical simulation software for The MathWorks. A couple of excellent neuroscience courses at Brandeis University convinced him to study brains instead. He now spends his time trying to understand bugs that are a bit more fun to work on than the ones he encountered in his previous career.Runtime: 48:38 minutesOur goal is to establish causal links between the dynamics of neural circuits and the behavioral decisions that an animal continuously makes as it navigates a multi-sensory world. Our focus is on computations in the central complex, a middle-of-the-insect-brain region that is thought to be important for sensory-guided decision making, navigation and motor control. We believe that our choice of studying the function of a higher brain region involved in sensorimotor processing requires us to study neural activity in a behaving organism. Furthermore, validating any potential answers requires manipulating neural circuits in precise and well-controlled ways. This leads us to our experimental system, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which has long been the organism of choice for behavioral genetics and comes with tools to fluorescently label, manipulate the activity of, and optically record from genetically targeted neurons