Comparing Kenyon cells between sawflies (ancestral Hymenoptera) and honeybees:

"Evolutionary dynamics of mushroom body Kenyon cell types in hymenopteran brains from multi-functional type to functionally specialized types", Kuwabara et al. 2023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4201

"the functions in learning and memory of the ancestral KC type were heterogeneously inherited among the KC types in the honey bee."

#neuroscience #Hymenoptera #honeybees #bees #KenyonCells

"Hacking brain development to test models of sensory coding"
Ahmed et al. 2023 (Clowney lab)

"we develop methods to increase and decrease Kenyon cell claw number and therefore the number of olfactory inputs that individual Kenyon cells receive."

(claws are the inputs from projection neurons (PNs), and Kenyon cells are like granular cells in the cerebellum.)

"We then use these circuit-hacked animals to test the effects of altering Kenyon cell number and claw number on sensory representations and associative learning behavior. We find that changing Kenyon cell number only modestly affects population-level odor responses. In contrast, Kenyon cell odor responses change bidirectionally as we change Kenyon cell dendritic claw number, such that Kenyon cells become less odor-selective as their input number grows."

"Remarkably, animals with reduced Kenyon cell population size can learn simple olfactory associations, and animals with augmented sets of Kenyon cells show improved associative learning."

#Drosophila #neuroscience #KenyonCells #MushroomBody