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Neurobiology

Individuality sniffed out in flies

Nature volume 526, pages 200–201 (2015)Cite this article

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The discovery that certain neurons' odour responses differ between individual fruit flies, but are consistent across the hemispheres of each fly's brain, indicates that sensory processing depends on an individual's experience. See Letter p.258

Organisms process sensory information to learn about their environment and to inform future behaviours. The first layers of sensory processing transform information from the sense organs into sparse and stimulus-specific activity patterns across large populations of neurons in the brain1. But the subsequent processing steps are less well understood. In a paper on Nature's website, Hige et al.2 (page 258 of this issue) address this gap in knowledge by studying the olfactory system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

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Figure 1: Reorganizing odour representations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thomas Frank and Rainer W. Friedrich are at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel 4058, Switzerland.,

    Thomas Frank & Rainer W. Friedrich

  2. R.W.F. is also at the University of Basel, Basel 4003, Switzerland.,

    Rainer W. Friedrich

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  1. Thomas Frank
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  2. Rainer W. Friedrich
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Correspondence to Rainer W. Friedrich.

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Frank, T., Friedrich, R. Individuality sniffed out in flies. Nature 526, 200–201 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15636

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