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Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae

Finding food is a vital skill and a constant task for any animal, and associative learning of food-predicting cues gives an advantage in this daily struggle. The strength of the associations between cues and food depends on a number of parameters, such as the salience of the cue, the strength of the...

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Autores principales: Thane, Michael, Viswanathan, Vignesh, Meyer, Tessa Christin, Paisios, Emmanouil, Schleyer, Michael
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6802848/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31634372
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224154
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author Thane, Michael
Viswanathan, Vignesh
Meyer, Tessa Christin
Paisios, Emmanouil
Schleyer, Michael
author_facet Thane, Michael
Viswanathan, Vignesh
Meyer, Tessa Christin
Paisios, Emmanouil
Schleyer, Michael
author_sort Thane, Michael
collection PubMed
description Finding food is a vital skill and a constant task for any animal, and associative learning of food-predicting cues gives an advantage in this daily struggle. The strength of the associations between cues and food depends on a number of parameters, such as the salience of the cue, the strength of the food reward and the number of joint cue-food experiences. We investigate what impact the strength of an associative odour-sugar memory has on the microbehaviour of Drosophila melanogaster larvae. We find that larvae form stronger memories with increasing concentrations of sugar or odour, and that these stronger memories manifest themselves in stronger modulations of two aspects of larval microbehaviour, the rate and the direction of lateral reorientation manoeuvres (so-called head casts). These two modulations of larval behaviour are found to be correlated to each other in every experiment performed, which is in line with a model that assumes that both modulations are controlled by a common motor output. Given that the Drosophila larva is a genetically tractable model organism that is well suited to the study of simple circuits at the single-cell level, these analyses can guide future research into the neuronal circuits underlying the translation of associative memories of different strength into behaviour, and may help to understand how these processes are organised in more complex systems.
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spelling pubmed-68028482019-11-02 Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae Thane, Michael Viswanathan, Vignesh Meyer, Tessa Christin Paisios, Emmanouil Schleyer, Michael PLoS One Research Article Finding food is a vital skill and a constant task for any animal, and associative learning of food-predicting cues gives an advantage in this daily struggle. The strength of the associations between cues and food depends on a number of parameters, such as the salience of the cue, the strength of the food reward and the number of joint cue-food experiences. We investigate what impact the strength of an associative odour-sugar memory has on the microbehaviour of Drosophila melanogaster larvae. We find that larvae form stronger memories with increasing concentrations of sugar or odour, and that these stronger memories manifest themselves in stronger modulations of two aspects of larval microbehaviour, the rate and the direction of lateral reorientation manoeuvres (so-called head casts). These two modulations of larval behaviour are found to be correlated to each other in every experiment performed, which is in line with a model that assumes that both modulations are controlled by a common motor output. Given that the Drosophila larva is a genetically tractable model organism that is well suited to the study of simple circuits at the single-cell level, these analyses can guide future research into the neuronal circuits underlying the translation of associative memories of different strength into behaviour, and may help to understand how these processes are organised in more complex systems. Public Library of Science 2019-10-21 /pmc/articles/PMC6802848/ /pubmed/31634372 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224154 Text en © 2019 Thane et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Thane, Michael
Viswanathan, Vignesh
Meyer, Tessa Christin
Paisios, Emmanouil
Schleyer, Michael
Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae
title Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae
title_full Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae
title_fullStr Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae
title_full_unstemmed Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae
title_short Modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in Drosophila larvae
title_sort modulations of microbehaviour by associative memory strength in drosophila larvae
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6802848/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31634372
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224154
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