Neural circuits underlying social behaviors in Drosophila

Topic: Neural circuits underlying social behaviors in Drosophila

Speaker: Chuan ZHOU, Ph.D.

Janelia Research Campus/HHMI,USA

Host: Professor GAO Shaorong

Time: 10:00AM-11:30AM, 1ST JUNE, 2015

Venue: Room 1102, Medical Building

Intro:

Focused on understanding the connectivity and function of neural circuits underlying social behaviors, in particular male-male aggression and male-female courtship. Drosophila provides a particularly tractable system to approach this goal, where I can mark, map and manipulate genetically defined populations of neurons or measure the activity of them. Using Drosophila as a model system, I will take a multidisciplinary approach combining molecular biology, genetics, optical imaging and neurobiology to identify the circuits controlling social behaviors, and to determine how multimodal sensory information is relayed and integrated in the fly brain to generate stereotypical motor outputs during social behaviors.