Project description
Modelling fly brain responses to sensory stimuli in space
In order to survive, animals must find food and mates and avoid threats. To do this, they obtain relevant information from the environment using their evolved sensory systems. Sensory information is coupled with movement and thus motor systems. Additionally, animals sense the environment by moving in it. This movement in space sets the frame of reference for sensory information. With this in mind, the EU-funded ASIMOF project has developed a virtual reality arena to track fly locomotion and control of their visual environment online. It aims to use the data obtained on active sensation behaviour to model how the fly brain responds to sensory stimuli in space. The project will assess the behavioural capacities of flies and identify underlying visuomotor pathways.
Objective
All animals need to solve some key tasks in order to survive: they need to find food, mates, and avoid threats. To do this they have evolved sensory systems of various modalities, to obtain relevant information from their environment. However, sensation does not happen in isolation: in order to respond to salient environmental cues, sensory information needs to be coupled to movement, and thus motor systems. Furthermore, sensation itself is an active process: animals sense environment by moving in it. This movement in space (whether eyes scanning the environment, or the animal itself moving through it) sets the reference frame for sensory information. We have developed a virtual reality arena that allows online tracking of the fly locomotion, and control of their visual environment. When exploring their environment Drosophila locomotion consists of straight runs and fast saccadic turns.
However, when sensing a directional aversive cue (the heated wall of the arena) the flies perform a fast, evasive saccadic turn directly away from it. In order to do this optimally, they need to integrate their self-motion with the aversive stimulus, by using the former as a reference frame for the latter, and compute the angle of the evasive maneuvre. We will use this active sensation behaviour (with components of self-motion, spatially localized sensory signal, and a directional motor response) as a model for how the fly brain responds to sensory stimuli in space. We will first assess the behavioural capacities of the flies in this context, and whether their behaviour changes as a function of experience. We will identify underlying visuomotor pathways by functional imaging of targeted neurons while the flies are performing the behaviour in a virtual reality environment, and by Electron Microcopy based reconstruction of neuronal connectivity. Finally, we will determine the computations that the underlying circuits are performing by combination of functional imaging and modelling.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-WF-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-WF-02-2019
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
1400-038 Lisboa
Portugal