PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
A central goal of neuroscience is to understand how the brain creates an internal representation of the sensory
world, and how the coordinated activity of neurons and circuits transforms this representation into simple
actions and behaviors. To get at these questions, neuroscientists rely heavily on a small set of model
organisms such as C. elegans, Drosophila, and mice. These provide the advantage of excellent experimental
access owing to their sophisticated neurogenetic techniques and facile propagation in the laboratory. Yet, an
unintended consequence of this focus is that most of what we know about sensory representation comes from
a very limited number of species—a few vertebrate and invertebrate model animals that are adapted to live in
moderate conditions favorable to humans, like those of a common laboratory. The goal of this proposal is to
establish the desert-dwelling fly Drosophila mojavensis as a new model system to study the cellular and
molecular mechanisms behind sensory adaptations to environmental conditions such as extreme heat and dry
air. The work proposed involves the application of genome editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9-
mediated knockouts and transgenesis to study principles of thermo- and hygro-sensory processing in this
species. Comparing the organization of sensory circuits in this desert-dwelling fly to those of the common
laboratory fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will lead to a greater understanding of the conserved principles
behind temperature/humidity sensing and preference behavior, and help reveal the evolutionary forces that
shape an animal’s ability to colonize new environmental niches. In general, increasing the diversity of the
model systems we study will proportionally increase our understanding of how sensory systems evolve, reveal
conserved principles of sensory processing, and ultimately help us better extrapolate results we obtain in
animal studies to the human nervous system, in both normal and disease states.