Barry Dickson

How are instinctive behaviours wired into an animal’s nervous system? Mating is one of the strongest instincts in most animal species, and we’re trying to figure out what is going on in the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila as it seeks to fulfil this primal urge. We’ve identified sex-specific neurons in male and female brains that encode their respective states of sexual arousal and traced out the sensory pathways that induce these states. In the aroused state, specific sensorimotor pathways are activated to choreograph the song-and-dance routine that the pair perform as a prelude to copulation. Flies, like most animals, are also excellent navigators, capable of traversing variable terrain in search of mates or food. We have recently elucidated the central steering circuit in Drosophila that couples the navigation and locomotor systems in both goal-directed and exploratory turning. I will present our recent findings on the mating and steering circuits in Drosophila and outline future research directions that aim to use both mate choice and spatial navigation as models to reverse engineer animal cognition.

Queensland Brain Institute