MIT Colloquium on Brain & Cognition with Hokto Kazama, PhD

RIKEN Brain Science Institute

Decoding of olfactory representations in Drosophila

One of the major aims of our lab is to crack the olfactory code - revealing the quantitative relationship between population neural activity and olfactory behavior of an animal. Decades of studies have established that information about olfactory stimuli is encoded as spatio-temporal patterns of glomerular activity in the primary olfactory processing center (the olfactory bulb in vertebrates and the antennal lobe in insects). However, how these patterns of activity are decoded by neural circuits to shape odor-guided behavior remains elusive. In this talk, I will introduce our efforts to address this question in the fruit fly Drosophila by combining comprehensive neuronal imaging, tracking of innate behavior in a flight arena, and computational modeling.

Hokto Kazama received his B.S. in physics and Ph.D. in neuroscience from The University of Tokyo, studying the mechanisms of synaptogenesis in Drosophila with Dr. Akinao Nose. From 2006, he was a postdoc in Dr. Rachel Wilson’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where he investigated how synaptic dynamics and neuronal connectivity dictate information processing in the olfactory circuit of the adult fly. In 2010, he returned to Japan and joined RIKEN Brain Science Institute to start his own laboratory. His lab aims to understand computations and circuit mechanisms underlying innate and adaptive behavior using Drosophila by combining opto/electrophysiology, behavioral analysis, genetics, and modeling.

Host

Susumu Tonegawa

Organizer

Brittany Greenough