Auditory system of flies as a new model to study the short-term memory

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25640010
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Neurophysiology / General neuroscience
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: Kamikouchi Azusa 名古屋大学, 理学(系)研究科(研究院), 教授 (00525264)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 聴覚 / 音識別

Outline of Final Research Achievements

To start a high-through put analysis of the acoustic behavior of fruit flies, we developed an automatic system'ChaIN', to quantify the typical acoustic behavior of flies using machine-vision. By using this ChaIN software, we analyzed the acoustic behavior in response to sound of different patterns and found that the flies changed their response behavior immediately after the sound shift.This behavioral change was observed even in a memory mutant strain that lacks the rutabaga adenylyl cyclase gene, showing that the neural mechanism that discriminates sound patterns is independent of this gene. This project established a novel method to explore the neural mechanism how the brain discriminates different temporal pattern of acoustic stimuli.

Free Research Field

神経科学