Université de Fribourg

Pavlovian conditioning of larval drosophila: an illustrated, multilingual, hands-on manual for odor-taste associative learning in maggots

Michels, Birgit ; Saumweber, Timo ; Biernacki, Roland ; Thum, Jeanette ; Glasgow, Rupert D. V. ; Schleyer, Michael ; Chen, Yi-chun ; Eschbach, Claire ; Stocker, Reinhard F. ; Toshima, Naoko ; Tanimura, Teiichi ; Louis, Matthieu ; Arias-Gil, Gonzalo ; Marescotti, Manuela ; Benfenati, Fabio ; Gerber, Bertram

In: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2017, vol. 11, p. -

Larval Drosophila offer a study case for behavioral neurogenetics that is simple enough to be experimentally tractable, yet complex enough to be worth the effort. We provide a detailed, hands-on manual for Pavlovian odor-reward learning in these animals. Given the versatility of Drosophila for genetic analyses, combined with the evolutionarily shared genetic heritage with humans, the paradigm...

Université de Fribourg

Four individually identified paired dopamine neurons signal reward in larval Drosophila

Rohwedder, Astrid ; Wenz, Nana L. ; Stehle, Bernhard ; Huser, Annina ; Yamagata, Nobuhiro ; Zlatic, Marta ; Truman, James W. ; Tanimoto, Hiromu ; Saumweber, Timo ; Gerber, Bertram ; Thum, Andreas S.

In: Current Biology, 2016, vol. 26, no. 5, p. 661–669

Dopaminergic neurons serve multiple functions, including reinforcement processing during associative learning [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12]. It is thus warranted to understand which dopaminergic neurons mediate which function. We study larval Drosophila, in which only approximately 120 of a total of 10,000 neurons are dopaminergic, as judged by the expression of tyrosine...