This is the final and for me most interesting day at this conference. This day is all about fly behavior. It started with the involvement of dopamine in the regulation of sleep loss and its impact on learning and response inhibition by Paul Shaw.
Then came a talk about selective visual attention which I thought was especially interesting. Mikko Juusola told us about experiments where they put electrodes in fly brains whith the flies attached to the flight-simulator and then recorded field potentials from the optic lobes while the animals were generating turning behavior. Pretty cool stuff and related to our own study on spontaneous behavior! I'll have to watch out for when this will be published, there's much to learn from these results. I actually talked to Mikko after the session for so long, that I missed the second and final session of the conference...
The next talk was about mushroom-body extrinsic neurons and classical olfactory conditioning from the lab of Thomas Préat. This data suggested that activity in neurons reading from the mushroom-body alpha lobes is required for this type of learning.
The next talk was about a classic brain morphology mutant called mushroom-body miniature (mbm). The speaker was Christine Serway from the lab of Steve de Belle. These flies are sterile, have a reduced calyx volume, fused beta-lobes and reduced scores in classical olfactory learning. Their data suggested that the mbm mutation is in the pendulin gene (importin alpha 2).
The last talk before the coffee break was about this classic behavioral gene forager. The gene has two famous alleles, rover and sitter. From these names you may guess that it was first discovered in studying foraging behavior, where rover larvae were moving around more than sitter larvae. The two alleles are naturally ocurring alleles in the wild. In a heterogeneous environment, rovers find more food patches than sitters. The alleles also differ in their performance in classical olfactory conditioning. This group tested if the rover allele is adaptive in patchy environments and if this adaptation is what combines the foraging and the learning differences between the two alleles. To mimic a heterogenous environment, they studied reversal learning and indeed rovers are better at reversal learning than sitters. The interesting thing here is that sitters appear not to favor any of the two trials, whereas rovers preferentially learn the second (the reversal) trial (retroactive interference?).