Seminars and Colloquia
Biology
Circadian clock facilitates memory formation in Drosophila melanogaster
Thu, Nov 03, 2016,
12:00 PM to 01:00 PM
at Seminar Room 34, 2nd Floor, Main Building
Nitin S Chouhan
Rudolf Virchow Centre, University of Wuerzburg, Germany
(IISER Pune Alumni - 2006 batch)
Endogenous biological oscillators in organisms enable anticipation of daily environmental cycles and regulate corresponding adaptations in behavior. These biological oscillators can also facilitate time of day specific encoding of learning and memory. Time-place learning, which enables organisms to associate the location of a stimulus (like food or mate) with a certain time of day, has been shown in mice and bees. However, the mechanistic understanding of time-specific memories remains unexplored. We have shown that Drosophila melanogaster can form time-odor memories. We trained flies in an appetitive-conditioning paradigm to associate specific odors with sucrose at certain times of day. Our results indicate that Drosophila can express appetitive memory at the relevant time of day if the two conditioning events are separated by more than 4 hours. Our experiments further demonstrate that an endogenous clock is required to form time related memories. We also observed that acute state of hunger promotes time-memory acquisition and consolidation in flies. Our results demonstrate that flies can accommodate time of day information during appetitive conditioning. Our paradigm also facilitates further investigations of specific neurogenetic factors that enable time-tagging of odor memories.
Note: Nitin Chouhan was in the first batch of BS-MS students graduating from IISER Pune.
