Université de Fribourg

Developmental origin of wiring specificity in the olfactory system of Drosophila

Jefferis, Gregory S. X. E. ; Vyas, Raj M. ; Berdnik, Daniela ; Ramaekers, Ariane ; Stocker, Reinhard F. ; Tanaka, Nobuaki K. ; Ito, Kei ; Luo, Liqun

In: Development, 2004, vol. 131, p. 117-130

In both insects and mammals, olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) expressing specific olfactory receptors converge their axons onto specific glomeruli, creating a spatial map in the brain. We have previously shown that second order projection neurons (PNs) in Drosophila are prespecified by lineage and birth order to send their dendrites to one of ~50 glomeruli in the antennal lobe. How can a given...

Université de Fribourg

Odor Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and its Relationship to Food Neophobia

Luisier, Anne-Claude ; Petitpierre, Geneviève ; Ferdenzi, Camille ; Clerc Bérod, Annick ; Giboreau, Agnes ; Rouby, Catherine ; Bensafi, Moustafa

In: Frontiers in Psychology, 2015, p. 6:1830

Atypical sensory functioning in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been well documented in the last decade for the visual, tactile and auditory systems, but olfaction in ASD is still understudied. The aim of the present study was to examine whether children with ASD and neuro-typically (NT) developed children differed in odor perception, at the cognitive (familiarity and identification...

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...

Université de Fribourg

The olfactory pathway of adult and larval Drosophila: conservation or adaptation to stage-specific needs ?

Stocker, Reinhard F.

In: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009, vol. 1170, p. 482 - 486

Tracing of olfactory projections based on odorant receptor expression has led to an almost complete receptor-to-glomerulus map in adult Drosophila. While most of the glomeruli may be involved in processing of food odors, others appear to be more specialized, for example, responding to CO₂ or to pheromonal cues. Recent studies have shed light on signal processing in the antennal lobe and in...