A single population of olfactory sensory neurons mediates an innate avoidance behaviour in Drosophila

Greg S. B. Suh, Allan M. Wong, Anne C. Hergarden, Jing W. Wang, Anne F. Simon, Seymour Benzer, Richard Axel and David J. Anderson ()
Additional contact information
Greg S. B. Suh: California Institute of Technology
Allan M. Wong: California Institute of Technology
Anne C. Hergarden: California Institute of Technology
Jing W. Wang: California Institute of Technology
Anne F. Simon: California Institute of Technology
Seymour Benzer: California Institute of Technology
Richard Axel: California Institute of Technology
David J. Anderson: California Institute of Technology

Nature, 2004, vol. 431, issue 7010, 854-859

Abstract: Abstract All animals exhibit innate behaviours in response to specific sensory stimuli that are likely to result from the activation of developmentally programmed neural circuits. Here we observe that Drosophila exhibit robust avoidance to odours released by stressed flies. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry identifies one component of this ‘Drosophila stress odorant (dSO)’ as CO2. CO2 elicits avoidance behaviour, at levels as low as 0.1%. We used two-photon imaging with the Ca2+-sensitive fluorescent protein G-CaMP to map the primary sensory neurons governing avoidance to CO2. CO2 activates only a single glomerulus in the antennal lobe, the V glomerulus; moreover, this glomerulus is not activated by any of 26 other odorants tested. Inhibition of synaptic transmission in sensory neurons that innervate the V glomerulus, using a temperature-sensitive Shibire gene (Shits)1, blocks the avoidance response to CO2. Inhibition of synaptic release in the vast majority of other olfactory receptor neurons has no effect on this behaviour. These data demonstrate that the activation of a single population of sensory neurons innervating one glomerulus is responsible for an innate avoidance behaviour in Drosophila.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02980 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:431:y:2004:i:7010:d:10.1038_nature02980

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature02980

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().