Circuit Reconstruction

Central research question: Do flies feel pain, and how?

This is a hot question today in neuroscience, and I seek to answer this by identifying neural circuits that mediate pain-like behaviors in the fruit fly. The ability to detect damaging mechanical stimuli is one of the most important functions of the nervous system. This ability, called nociception, is conserved throughout the animal kingdom and drives behaviors such as contextual aversion and locomotive changes. In humans, nociception underlies subjective feelings of discomfort, referred to as affective pain. In comparison, reflexive pain is the rapid behavioral response to nociceptive stimulation. This phenomenon in Drosophila larvae is well-characterized. However, the mechanisms underlying adult Drosophila nociception remains elusive. Due to the difficulty of measuring complex internal states in non-human animals, disentangling the neural pathways and mechanisms that distinguish reflexive vs. affective pain remains challenging.

I will reconstruct the anatomy and connectivity of nociceptive circuits in the fly’s central nervous system. I will then combine circuit reconstruction, optogenetic manipulations, and automated measurements of fly behavior to investigate how nociceptive signals are integrated in the fly brain to mediate responses to nociception.