Prathyush Kandimalla (Hong lab, Caltech) starting off with a really neat observation about insects: despite considerable morphological diversity, the central complex (think navigation center) looks really similar. Also really similar: the developmental programs that build and wire the central complex.

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He's focusing on small field neurons that tile the central complex. Building powerful; models to link behavior to functional organization. Y'all will love this.

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Next up is Noah Dillon (Doe lab, UO) looking at columnar neurons in the central complex to understand temporal patterning.

Basically, there are early-born and late-born neurons and the differences between them can be profoundly important in establishing their role in behavior. So understanding how the switch between these two types comes to be matters a lot. Noah discovered that knocking out a gene called seven-up (yes really) causes selective loss of late-born neurons.

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Lunch break, with emerging themes: the role of lineage in establishing behavioral modules, ways evolution might build on such modules, and how darn nice it is at UNM.

Also, @tdverstynen , enchiladas for lunch!

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Next up is Minoru Koyama from U Toronto with "A strategy for understanding emergence of complex behavior."

Minoru uses #zebrafish to study how developing animals acquire ever more complex locomotor behaviors. He's introducing the idea of "motor primitives" as building blocks and working on identifying the neuronal underpinnings of these primitives -- and their developmental origins!

Relevant work: https://elifesciences.org/articles/42135

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...need some more space here: "hacking brain development" means "making a bunch more of a specific set of neurons."

This is such a powerful way to ask "what happens to the inputs to the neurons if there are 2x more targets?" In this case, the number of inputs scales -- which is pretty damn cool.

And there are profound consequences for how those neurons can respond to sensory stimulation (like odors).

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Here comes Josie Clowney from UMich on
"Hacking brain devleopment to test models of sensory coding"

Bringing us back to the #Drosophila #mushroom body with an open question: how do the programs that specify neuronal fate produce cells with particular computational structures (patterns of inputs). This is important b/c different numbers of neurons and numbers of inputs ultimately determine how neurons work.

relevant #preprint : @biorxivpreprint https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.25.525425v1

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"Lineage-based dissection of neural circuit formation and behavior" new PI Haluk Lacin from #UMKC.
The talk starts off with a pretty compelling point: #Drosophila can do a heck of a lot of things if you remove their heads!

...so it's really motivating to think about how you build a ventral nerve cord (the fly equivalent of the vertebrate spinal cord). There are developmentally-specified populations of neurons that flies need to escape from looming stimuli (like a swatter).

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Up next with Alex Kolodkin from Johns Hopkins on the development, wiring and function of direction-selective circuits in the mammalian visual system.

How do you put together a direction-selective brain circuit, in this case for stabilizing the image on the retina.

Relevant paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222012131

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Jim Truman leads with #metamorphosis of the #Drosophila mushroom body (a locus of memory). He's walking us through a most beautiful piece of work. Special shout-out to the foresight it took to begin this work before there was a #connectome available so as to inform ongoing work.

tl;dr the molecular events that shape larval development can fade, allowing trans-differentiation of neurons (a shift from one brain area to another).

Shout-outs to @scottishwaddell

https://elifesciences.org/articles/80594
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