Prof Scott Waddell, Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the CNCB, has been elected as a Member of EMBO, in recognition of his molecular biology-directed studies of brain function in Drosophila.
EMBO has announced today on the occasion of its 50thanniversary that 106 researchers in the life sciences were newly elected to its membership. Of these, one hundred scientists reside in Europe and neighbouring countries; six Associate Members were elected from China, Japan and the United States. The EMBO Membership currently comprises more than 1600 life scientists.
EMBO Members make invaluable contributions to the organization by providing suggestions and feedback on the activities of EMBO. They serve on selection committees for EMBO programmes and mentor young scientists. Their input has helped to promote excellence in life sciences since 1964.
Speaking of the new members, EMBO Director Maria Leptin said. “In the past decades, many of the concepts, techniques and insights of molecular biology have been applied to fundamental questions in other disciplines of the life sciences. Molecular explanations are now emerging for the origins and functions of complex systems like the brain and the living world around us. We wanted to reflect more of these exciting developments in our membership.”
She added: “Great leaps in scientific progress often arise when fundamental approaches like molecular biology are applied to previously unconsidered or emerging disciplines. Looking forward, we want to ensure that all communities of the life sciences benefit from this type of cross-pollination.”
A CNCB double bill—papers from the Miesenböck and Waddell groups—appears in the September 4 issue of Neuron.
Click here to read Moshe Parnas, Andrew Lin, Wolf Huetteroth and Gero Miesenböck on ‘Odor discrimination in Drosophila: from neural population codes to behavior.’
Click here to read Emmanuel Perisse, Yan Yin, Andrew Lin, Suewei Lin, Wolf Huetteroth and Scott Waddell on ‘Different Kenyon cell populations drive learned approach and avoidance in Drosophila.’
Fruit fly brains use reward signals like ours
CNCB team shows that the neural reward system of flies is more similar to that of mammals than previously thought.
A team led by Scott Waddell of the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour shows that the fruit fly brain contains an evaluation system that is more similar to mammals than previously recognised. The research, published in Nature this month, demonstrates that the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is synonymous with reward and motivation in mammals, plays a similar role in food-rewarded behaviour in fruit flies.
‘We have long expected that the fruit fly brain would assign values to objects during learning and decision-making using neural circuit mechanisms quite similar to those in mammals,’ says Waddell. ‘Importantly, this work further demonstrates the remarkable evolutionary conservation of neural mechanisms and suggests that by studying the humble fruit fly, we can learn a great deal about our own brains.’
The team’s research, spearheaded by graduate student Christopher Burke and postdoctoral fellow Wolf Huetteroth, also addressed a long-standing puzzle. Octopamine, an analogue of noradrenaline, was historically thought to be the reward signal in insects with dopamine only representing aversive events. However, Burke’s experiments showed that octopamine signals reward through specific dopamine neurons. More strikingly, whereas octopamine only forms transient memories of the pleasure of sweet taste, the dopamine neurons give rise to long-lasting memories of nutritional relevance*.
The work used the most state-of-the art genetic tool-kit to implant appetitive olfactory memories in the fly brain with direct activation of octopamine or dopamine releasing neurons, bypassing the usual presentation of a sugar reward.