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

Characterization of the octopaminergic and tyraminergic neurons in the central brain of Drosophila larvae

Selcho, Mareike ; Pauls, Dennis ; Huser, Annina ; Stocker, Reinhard F. ; Thum, Andreas S.

In: Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2014, p. –

Drosophila larvae are able to evaluate sensory information based on prior experience, similar to adult flies, other insect species and vertebrates. Larvae and adult flies can be taught to associate odor stimuli with sugar reward and prior work has implicated both the octopaminergic and dopaminergic modulatory systems in reinforcement signaling. Here we use genetics to analyze the anatomy, up to...

Université de Fribourg

The serotonergic central nervous system of the drosophila larva: anatomy and behavioral function

Huser, Annina ; Rohwedder, Astrid ; Apostolopoulou, Anthi A. ; Widmann, Annekathrin ; Pfitzenmaier, Johanna E. R. ; Maiolo, Elena M. ; Selcho, Mareike ; Pauls, Dennis ; Essen, Alina von ; Gupta, Tripti ; Sprecher, Simon G. ; Birman, Serge ; Riemensperger, Thomas ; Stocker, Reinhard F. ; Thum, Andreas S.

In: PLoS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, no. 10, p. e47518

The Drosophila larva has turned into a particularly simple model system for studying the neuronal basis of innate behaviors and higher brain functions. Neuronal networks involved in olfaction, gustation, vision and learning and memory have been described during the last decade, often up to the single-cell level. Thus, most of these sensory networks are substantially defined, from the sensory...