The University of Tokyo · Neuroscience
Professor Hokto Kazama's research lab investigates the neural circuits and computational principles underlying sensory processing, learning, and decision-making in the Drosophila brain. The lab focuses on how olfactory and gustatory systems integrate to guide behavior, with particular emphasis on the role of dopaminergic neurons in encoding innate and experience-dependent sensory values. Using a combination of in vivo imaging, electrophysiology, connectomics, and computational modeling, the lab uncovers circuit mechanisms for representational stability, plasticity, and sensory integration. Their work bridges molecular, cellular, and systems-level understanding of neural computation in a genetically tractable model organism.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Abstracts of the 25th Annual Computational Neuroscience\nMeeting: CNS-2016\nSeogwipo City, Jeju-do, South Korea. 2–7 July 2016
The Drosophila antennal lobe is organized into glomerular compartments, where olfactory receptor neurons synapse onto projection neurons. Projection neuron dendrites also receive input from local neurons, which interconnect glomeruli. In this study, we investigated how activity in this circuit changes over time when sensory afferents are chronically removed in vivo. In the normal circuit, excitatory connections between glomeruli are weak. However, after we chronically severed receptor neuron axo
Dopaminergic neurons (DANs) drive associative learning to update the value of sensory cues, but their contribution to the assessment of sensory values outside the context of association remains largely unexplored. Here, we show in Drosophila that DANs in the mushroom body encode the innate value of odors and constantly update the current value by inducing plasticity during olfactory maneuver. Our connectome-based network model linking all the way from the olfactory neurons to DANs reproduces the
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