Responsibilities
Research Group Leader
Contact
LMU-Munich / MPI for Biological Intelligence
Email:
i.ribeiro@lmu.de
Website:
https://ribeiroinesmalab.com/
Further Information
Keywords:
vision, social behavior, neural circuits, genetics
Research methods:
Vision starts in the retina as an abstract 2-dimensional array of fluctuating light intensities from which motion, color or other visual features are extracted. For an insect with limited spatial resolution vision, a potential mate and a potential competitor may be visually very similar, yet elicit different social behaviors – courtship or aggression - due to different chemosensory signatures. Our group leverages visual detection of animals of the same species as discrete objects, occurring in insect social interactions, to uncover the molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms governing behavior. We draw on robust social behavior paradigms, genetic tools to access single neuron types, functional imaging, and unbiased data analysis algorithms to this knowledge gap in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a genetic model organism with an extensive genetic toolkit, that yields insights into how the brain works with unmatched statistical power and cellular resolution.
Brief research description:
The brain processes multiple sensory cues during ongoing, dynamic behavior. Diverse environmental or internal contexts can modify how sensory information is processed. The overarching question guiding our research is how are sensory cues are combined and modulated in the central brain to guide dynamic interactions occurring in social behaviors? Vision in particular starts as a rather abstract initial percept at the retina, from which visual features, such as contrast, color, motion, or discrete objects, are extracted and relayed to the central brain. Detection of discrete objects underlies seemingly disparate behaviors such as courtship, aggression, and avoidance in Drosophila melanogaster (Figure 1). Our work uncovered LC10a visual projection neurons as essential for the male to remain close to the female during courtship (Ribeiro, et al, 2018). LC10a neurons project to the largest retinorecipient area of the fly brain, the central unit of the anterior optic tubercle (AOTU), that retains spatial organization and receives information from at least four different visual projection neuron types associated with discrete object avoidance and attraction. Current work in the lab aims to delineate neural circuits that stem from the AOTU central unit, characterize the sensorimotor transformations such circuits perform and investigate the molecular mechanisms underpinning different circuit configurations involved in object avoidance and attraction.