A combination of genetic, anatomical and physiological techniques has revealed that the lateral horn, a region of the brain involved in olfaction in flies, has many more types of neurons than expected.
Although odorant binding proteins are widely believed to be required for transport of odorants to receptors, six types of sensilla of Drosophila respond robustly in their absence to many odor stimuli.
A high-throughput behavioral paradigm and computational modeling are used to decompose olfactory navigation in walking Drosophila melanogaster into a set of quantitative relationships between sensory input and motor output.
Odor conditioning induces two changes in olfactory neurons: non-associative sensory adaptation to odor history, and associative, bidirectional changes in behavioral output that are oppositely regulated in aversive and appetitive learning.
Mild myelin disruption leads to early axonal pathology, a novel pathological response in neural stem cells, regionally increased oligodendrocytes and altered behavior.
In naturalistic conditions, larvae of the Drosophila group exhibit species-specific strategies to search for food resources through a primitive form of risk-taking behavior that is controlled by a tradeoff between exploitation and odor-driven exploration.
Serotonergic cells innervating the Drosophila antennal lobe are inhibited by odors and modulate olfactory responses in conjunction with the entire serotonergic network.
Olfactory receptor neurons adapt to odorant mean and variance and use complementary kinetics to preserve the timing of odorant encounters, despite adaptation slowing down transduction.
