During the ASIMOF project we showed that when flies are exploring an environment consisting of a circular arena with aversively heated borders, they tend to stop exploring their environment after 6-7 minutes, followed by staying inactive for extended duration of time at the centre of the arena, i.e. the safest (coolest) location. This behaviour depends on visual sensory feedback, and more specifically on visual motion sensitive channels (T4/T5 neurons) that are also crucial for maintaining the normal structure of fly locomotion of straight runs and saccadic turns. Through an emerged collaboration, we also uncovered a small group of central neurons that appear to trigger saccade-like turns. Thirdly, we created computational analysis pipelines for useful for matching neurons across different neuroanatomy datasets
Measures to disseminate project results
Dissemination of the project was achieved by presenting the projects results at the Champalimaud internal seminars, through a potential co-publication of results stemming from a collaboration established during the project, and through publishing computational tools through the open-source platform of GitHub.
Measures to exploit the project results
Aside from the above ASIMOF generated a wealth of behavioural data and observations used as a basis for other projects in the Chiappe lab.