Our group studies how brains work using connectomes – high-resolution maps of all neurons in the brain and their synaptic connectivity. We are particularly interested in how the brain processes sensory information, how it learns and remembers, and how it controls behaviour. We primarily use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism but also study other animals such as the mosquito Aedes aegypti. Drosophila and other invertebrates are powerful models for studying the nervous system because of their relatively simple nervous system, genetic tractability, and the availability of powerful tools for manipulating and imaging neurons.
We were established at the University of Cambridge (Department of Zoology) in 2016 as part of an international, Wellcome Trust-funded to generate the first complete connectome of the adult Drosophila brain. Since then we have been involved in several large-scale connectomics projects, including multiple connectomes of the Drosophila central nervous system (see Publications).
One project we are currently working on is a connectome of the mosquito Aedes aegypti, as part of a new Wellcome Discovery Award granted to Dr Gregory Jefferis and Dr Elizabeth Marin and international collaborators including Dr Wei-Chung Allen Lee (Harvard Medical School) and Dr Meg Younger (Boston University). Our main neurobiological goal here is to elucidate the neural circuits that underlie human host-seeking, which involves the integration of carbon dioxide, body temperature, human host odour, and visual cues.
Another big endeavour is an ERC-funded project to generate connectomes for multiple Drosophilid species (plus a beetle) with the aim to understand how neural circuits evolve to generate species-specific behaviours. This is a large, multi-year international collaboration involving the MRC-LMB, the University of Cambridge, Rockefeller University, and the Rovira i Virgili University in Spain.
This blog is intended to make our work accessible to anyone interested, as well as scientific colleagues. We describe the history, methods, and findings of Connectomics as well as some of the neurobiological questions currently being researched in Drosophila, particularly olfaction and learning and memory.