Evolution of olfactory systems in drosophilds

Biosciences Seminar Series

Sensory systems encode the world around us to produce context-dependent appropriate behaviours. However, we know little about the way new sensory evoked behaviours arise as receptors and neural circuits are re-shaped during evolution. To bring insights into these questions, we are comparing the olfactory systems of different Drosophila species that have diverged in adaptation to diverse ecological niches. We found diversification both at the level of olfactory receptor proteins and neural circuit components, and identified the genetic bases behind these evolutionary changes. At the receptor protein level, through homology modelling, mutational analysis and ancient protein reconstruction, we delineated a molecular evolutionary trajectory that reveals how the specificity of a receptor has shifted multiple times from one salient odour to another.  In parallel, we are using an un-biased approach to investigate the cis- and trans-regulatory changes underlying the evolutionary expansion of a neuronal population. Together, our work sheds light on important mechanisms through which neural circuits change over evolutionary time.

Speaker: Dr Lucia Prieto-Godino, The Francis Crick Institute

Lucia obtained a B.A. from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain. After a year studying and working at Lund University in Sweden, she joined the University of Cambridge, UK for her PhD, where she studied the embryonic development of the Drosophila olfactory system in the lab of Mike Bate. For her postdoc she worked on the evolution of olfactory pathways in Drosophila, in the lab of Richard Benton at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since January 2018, she has her own group at The Francis Crick Institute, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. She has received multiple awards, including the FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize 2018 and the 2018 L’Oreal-UNESCO for women in science Fellowship. In addition to the lab work, Lucia founded and runs TReND (Teaching and Research in Natural Sciences for Development) in Africa, work for which she received the Passion in Science Award 2016.

Host: Dr Carolina Rezaval