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...

Université de Fribourg

The Drosophila larva as a model for studying chemosensation and chemosensory learning : a review

Gerber, Bertram ; Stocker, Reinhard F.

In: Chemical Senses, 2007, vol. 32, no. 1, p. 65-89

Understanding the relationship between brain and behavior is the fundamental challenge in neuroscience. We focus on chemosensation and chemosensory learning in larval Drosophila and review what is known about its molecular and cellular bases. Detailed analyses suggest that the larval olfactory system, albeit much reduced in cell number, shares the basic architecture, both in terms of...

Université de Fribourg

Visual learning in individually assayed Drosophila larvae

Gerber, Bertram ; Scherer, Sabine ; Neuser, K. ; Michels, B. ; Hendel, T. ; Stocker, Reinhard F. ; Heisenberg, M.

In: Journal of Experimental Biology, 2004, vol. 207, p. 179-188

An understanding of associative learning is facilitated if it can be analyzed in a simple animal like the fruit fly Drosophila. Here, we introduce the first visual associative learning paradigm for larval Drosophila; this is remarkable as larvae have an order of magnitude fewer neurons than adult flies. Larvae were subjected to either of two reciprocal training regimes: Light+/Dark- or...