Fruit flies (
Drosophila melanogaster) can make appropriate choices among alternative flight options based on the relative salience of competing visual cues, according to a recent study by a research team under the leadership of GUO Aike from the CAS Institute of Neuroscience.
As reported in a recent issue of
Science, Guo and his graduate students discovered that this choice behavior consists of early and late phases; the former requires activation of the dopaminergic system and mushroom bodies, while the latter is independent of these activities. Thus, the dynamic circuit from the dopamine system to mushroom bodies is crucial for choice behavior in Drosophila.
Furthermore, their immunohistological analyses showed that mushroom bodies are densely innervated by dopaminergic axons, suggesting the cooperation between these two neural components in choice behavior.
"This study in fruit flies may help us to understand high level cognitive processing in general," says Guo.
