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

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...