TY  - JOUR
A1  - El-Keredy, Amira
A1  - Schleyer, Michael
A1  - König, Christian
A1  - Ekim, Aslihan
A1  - Gerber, Bertram
T1  - Behavioural Analyses of Quinine Processing in Choice, Feeding and Learning of Larval Drosophila
JF  - PLoS One
N2  - Gustatory stimuli can support both immediate reflexive behaviour, such as choice and feeding, and can drive internal reinforcement in associative learning. For larval Drosophila, we here provide a first systematic behavioural analysis of these functions with respect to quinine as a study case of a substance which humans report as "tasting bitter". We describe the dose-effect functions for these different kinds of behaviour and find that a half-maximal effect of quinine to suppress feeding needs substantially higher quinine concentrations (2.0 mM) than is the case for internal reinforcement (0.6 mM). Interestingly, in previous studies (Niewalda et al. 2008, Schipanski et al 2008) we had found the reverse for sodium chloride and fructose/sucrose, such that dose-effect functions for those tastants were shifted towards lower concentrations for feeding as compared to reinforcement, arguing that the differences in dose-effect function between these behaviours do not reflect artefacts of the types of assay used. The current results regarding quinine thus provide a starting point to investigate how the gustatory system is organized on the cellular and/or molecular level to result in different behavioural tuning curves towards a bitter tastant.
KW  - honeybees
KW  - chemosensory system
KW  - bitter taste
KW  - melanogaster
KW  - receptor
KW  - reward
KW  - brain
KW  - organization
KW  - architecture
KW  - perception
Y1  - 2012
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-130811
VL  - 7
IS  - 7
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kleber, Jörg
A1  - Chen, Yi-Chun
A1  - Michels, Birgit
A1  - Saumweber, Timo
A1  - Schleyer, Michael
A1  - Kähne, Thilo
A1  - Buchner, Erich
A1  - Gerber, Bertram
T1  - Synapsin is required to "boost" memory strength for highly salient events
JF  - Learning and Memory
N2  - Synapsin is an evolutionarily conserved presynaptic phosphoprotein. It is encoded by only one gene in the Drosophila genome and is expressed throughout the nervous system. It regulates the balance between reserve and releasable vesicles, is required to maintain transmission upon heavy demand, and is essential for proper memory function at the behavioral level. Task-relevant sensorimotor functions, however, remain intact in the absence of Synapsin. Using an odor-sugar reward associative learning paradigm in larval Drosophila, we show that memory scores in mutants lacking Synapsin (syn\(^{97}\)) are lower than in wild-type animals only when more salient, higher concentrations of odor or of the sugar reward are used. Furthermore, we show that Synapsin is selectively required for larval short-term memory. Thus, without Synapsin Drosophila larvae can learn and remember, but Synapsin is required to form memories that match in strength to event salience-in particular to a high saliency of odors, of rewards, or the salient recency of an event. We further show that the residual memory scores upon a lack of Synapsin are not further decreased by an additional lack of the Sap47 protein. In combination with mass spectrometry data showing an up-regulated phosphorylation of Synapsin in the larval nervous system upon a lack of Sap47, this is suggestive of a functional interdependence of Synapsin and Sap47.
KW  - mushroom body
KW  - Kenyon cells
KW  - larval drosophila
KW  - Sap47
KW  - phosphorylation
KW  - synaptic vesicles
KW  - short-term memory
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-191440
VL  - 23
IS  - 1
ER  -