Final Activity Report Summary - OLFACTORYCIRCUITS (Functional and structural analysis of higher olfactory circuits in Drosophila)
In the meantime I also learnt the new technique of in vivo whole cell patch physiology, which allowed me to record from single genetically labelled neurons in a live fly. We recorded from to two populations of higher olfactory neurons of the lateral horn. One class turned out not to be odour responsive - they may in fact be modulatory neurons. The second class was indeed odour responsive; we are continuing to characterise how many different kinds of odours they respond to and how their responses change with odour concentration.
IRG support was for the first 2 years in a longer project (3 years in the first instance). In the third year of the project, in addition to the projects above, I also worked on the application of a new electron microscope technique, 3D serial block face scanning electron microscopy (SBFSEM), to the fly olfactory system. This will allow very high-resolution images of large fractions of the fly brain so that it will be possible to trace which neurons are connected. We obtained promising data for some fly brain samples when I visited the microscope's developers in Heidelberg. However the genetic technique designed to pick out small groups of neurons in this electron microscope images did not perform as expected so we are currently optimising this.