TY - JOUR TI - Auditory experience controls the maturation of song discrimination and sexual response in Drosophila AU - Li, Xiaodong AU - Ishimoto, Hiroshi AU - Kamikouchi, Azusa A2 - Griffith, Leslie C VL - 7 PY - 2018 DA - 2018/03/20 SP - e34348 C1 - eLife 2018;7:e34348 DO - 10.7554/eLife.34348 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34348 AB - In birds and higher mammals, auditory experience during development is critical to discriminate sound patterns in adulthood. However, the neural and molecular nature of this acquired ability remains elusive. In fruit flies, acoustic perception has been thought to be innate. Here we report, surprisingly, that auditory experience of a species-specific courtship song in developing Drosophila shapes adult song perception and resultant sexual behavior. Preferences in the song-response behaviors of both males and females were tuned by social acoustic exposure during development. We examined the molecular and cellular determinants of this social acoustic learning and found that GABA signaling acting on the GABAA receptor Rdl in the pC1 neurons, the integration node for courtship stimuli, regulated auditory tuning and sexual behavior. These findings demonstrate that maturation of auditory perception in flies is unexpectedly plastic and is acquired socially, providing a model to investigate how song learning regulates mating preference in insects. KW - auditory experience KW - song KW - acoustic perception KW - plasticity JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -