CNI Speaker Series: Glenn Turner

Glenn Turner
Janelia Research Campus, HHMI

The mushroom body and learning - flexibly assigning valence to odors

Flies form Pavlovian associations with odors. But which synapses change, and how do those modifications give rise to changes in behavior? The mushroom body (MB) is an area of the fly brain involved in learning and memory where odors elicit sparse, stimulus-specific response patterns. The downstream MB Output Neurons (MBONs) have recently been identified, and surprisingly number only 34 total cells. I will present recent findings that suggest the highly precise representations of odor identity in the MB are mapped onto lower-dimensional valence-based representations in the MBONs, more aligned to the behavioral output of the animal. And I will present results showing how that mapping is modified by synaptic plasticity as part of the learning process.


A pizza lunch will be served.