1. What can tiny mushrooms in fruit flies tell us about learning and memory?
- Author
-
Toshihide Hige
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,Dopamine ,Models, Neurological ,Action Potentials ,Sensory system ,Olfaction ,Biology ,Stimulus (physiology) ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Need to know ,Memory ,Animals ,Humans ,Organism ,Mushroom Bodies ,Neurons ,Neuronal Plasticity ,General Neuroscience ,fungi ,Association Learning ,General Medicine ,Associative learning ,Smell ,030104 developmental biology ,Drosophila melanogaster ,Mushroom bodies ,Odorants ,Olfactory Learning ,Neuroscience ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery - Abstract
Nervous systems have evolved to translate external stimuli into appropriate behavioral responses. In an ever-changing environment, flexible adjustment of behavioral choice by experience-dependent learning is essential for the animal's survival. Associative learning is a simple form of learning that is widely observed from worms to humans. To understand the whole process of learning, we need to know how sensory information is represented and transformed in the brain, how it is changed by experience, and how the changes are reflected on motor output. To tackle these questions, studying numerically simple invertebrate nervous systems has a great advantage. In this review, I will feature the Pavlovian olfactory learning in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The mushroom body is a key brain area for the olfactory learning in this organism. Recently, comprehensive anatomical information and the genetic tool sets were made available for the mushroom body circuit. This greatly accelerated the physiological understanding of the learning process. One of the key findings was dopamine-induced long-term synaptic plasticity that can alter the representations of stimulus valence. I will mostly focus on the new studies within these few years and discuss what we can possibly learn about the vertebrate systems from this model organism.
- Published
- 2017