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My lab:
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Couldn't live-blog the fourth session of our 'family' meeting, because the Max Planck Institute where we are located has a policy that all WiFi guest-accounts expire over night - and I thought a 'day' had 24h...

Anyway, the first session this morning (fourth session of the meeting) was all about olfactory conditioning. Two people worked on Drosophila: Claire Eschbach told us about experiments where she conditioned flies to discriminate single odors and mixtures of odors in various combinations. After her, Dana Galili showed that flies can do trace conditioning (this means there is a gap between the end of the conditioned stimulus, CS and the onset of the unconditioned stimulus, US) and that this conditioning is robust across different gap and stimulus durations. Two people from our department in Berlin working on honeybees rounded out this session Dorothea Eisenhardt told us about some behavioral properties of backward conditioning (i.e., the US starts before the CS) and Gérard Leboulle showed how down-regulation of the NR1 subunit of the NMDA glutamate receptor using RNAi in th bee brain interferes with olfactory learning.

Jean-Marc started off the fifth session with a talk on pharamcological disruption of synaptic plasticity in the honeybee and the effect of these treatments on th formation of long-term memory in the mushroom-bodies. His results suggested that maybe the addition of novel synapses in the mushroom-body lip region is associated with the formation of stable memory races. Next up was Johannes Felsenberg, a graduate student in our department. Johannes' boss did not want me to poast anything about his talk here. The person with the longest travel time came next, Judith Reinhard from the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia. She works on the olfactory receptors in the olfactory receptor neurons in the antennae of the honeybee.  She uses a heterologous expression system in cell culture to characterize these receptor molecules with respect to floral ligands. She then went on to show that expression levels of the different receptors they characterized varies between different populations of honeybees. Moreover, it appears that the receptor expression also decreases after training the bees to the ligands of these receptors. Wrapping this session up was the postdoc working in my lab, Julien Colomb. He presented my data on the involvement of PKC and FoxP in operant learning in Drosophila at the flight simulator and then showed what he plans to do with his newly set up apparatus.
Posted on Saturday 12 December 2009 - 12:19:49 comment: 0
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