"Circuit mechanisms underlying action selection" Dr. Tomoko Ohyama

Abstract

Animals need to choose the most appropriate action at any given moment to adapt successfully to the environment.  To do so, they must combine the messages that arrive through their various sensory systems to select the optimal action.  How nervous systems do this is one of the unsolved questions of neuroscience.  Here, by reconstructing the connectivity among neurons at synaptic resolution, recording neural activity, and analyzing escape behavior in fruit fly larvae, I identified a basic circuit motif that allows larvae to integrate information from different senses.  I propose that this architecture tunes nervous systems to specific ecological environmental cues to facilitate action selection.

Biography

Tomoko Ohyama obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2009 from Baylor College of Medicine at Houston, Texas, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of synaptic vesicle cycling with Hugo Bellen. She then join Marta Zlatic’s lab at the Janelia Research Campus as a post-doctoral fellow.  She has since been studying the circuit mechanisms underlying action selection in Drosophila larvae.