Neural Circuits for Flexible and Adaptive Behaviors

Animal behavior arises from an interplay between instinct and learning. Certain behaviors are innate and invariant across members of a species, suggesting they are genetically programmed into the nervous system. However, animals must also be able to flexibly adapt their behavior to accommodate ongoing changes to their external environment and internal needs or based on prior experience. The Ruta Lab uses an array of functional and neural tracing techniques to define the architecture and algorithms of neural circuits in Drosophila, an insect that exhibits a rich repertoire of innate and learned behaviors mediated by a simple nervous system. I will describe recent work in which they have begun to consider how neural circuits in the fly brain can be adapted at different time scales: over evolutionary epochs to generate species-specific innate behaviors or over the course of an individual's lifetime to generate learned behavioral adaptations.

Vanessa Ruta is an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at the Rockefeller University.