This $1,717,171 National Institutes of Health National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke project grant supports research at New York University School of Medicine from March 2022 to February 2025 under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders federal grant program (CFDA 93.853). The research aims to investigate the neural circuit basis of olfactory navigation in adult fruit flies. Researchers will use electrophysiology and imaging to study how...
This federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) program, provides $405,817 to support research on the mechanisms underlying spatial navigation and orientation in the Drosophila central complex. The research aims to elucidate how the fly's neural circuits integrate multimodal sensory cues, such as sky polarization and color, to construct...
This National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program Project Grant award of $350,000 to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) is funding research to decipher how neural circuits in fruit flies extract and preprocess visual features for navigation. The key objectives are to identify the specific visual features that two types of neurons, called ER neurons, extract along the anterior visual pathway, and to develop anatomically and experimentally supported...
This federal Project Grant award, valued at $630,636.00 and provided by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) program, supports research to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms driving neural circuit formation and function in the Drosophila central complex. The primary awardee, the University of New Mexico, will investigate the role of transcription...
This federal Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), supports collaborative research to develop a computational model of spatial navigation and representation using neural data obtained from animals navigating large mazes. The $174,998 award, effective from April 15, 2025 to March 31, 2028, will be led by researchers at The Johns Hopkins University. The project aims to investigate how...
The University of California, Berkeley received a $2,611,308 Project Grant from the National Institutes of Health Trans-NIH Research Support program to investigate how neuromodulation shapes the fluidity of spatial working memory. The grant will fund research from September 2022 through August 2025 to advance understanding of how working memory circuits balance flexibility and stability. Researchers will use Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, as an experimental model to define the neural...
This $243,590 Project Grant award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) federal grant program will support research on mapping and modeling the spatial topography of tactile neural circuits in the Drosophila fruit fly. The key objectives are to investigate how tactile sensory information from the fly's leg is represented in the ventral nerve cord, by...
The National Institute on Aging awarded a $925,896 Project Grant (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to study the functional role and neural basis of rapid turns in olfactory search behavior in flies. The research aims to elucidate the circuitry that controls both stimulus-evoked and spontaneous turns during olfactory search, and test their potential role in information-gathering. Caltech has subcontracted portions of the research to the...
This $211,875 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) program supports research to characterize the development and function of medulla visual projection (MEVP) neurons in the Drosophila visual system. The key objectives are to: 1) use lineage tracing to determine which neuroblasts give rise to MEVP neurons and perform transcriptomic...
This $1,414,816 National Science Foundation project grant supports research into the functional stratification of sensory encoding in the biological gyroscope of flying insects. Specifically, the grant funds work at Princeton University from January 2022 through July 2024 to reveal the principles of sensory encoding and sensorimotor processing that flies use to control their halteres and aerial maneuvers. The research will combine in vivo imaging and analysis approaches from computational...
This $124,632 project grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke will support the development of a testable biologically constrained model for path integration in fruit flies. Funded under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders program, the awardee will use agent-based modeling, pattern recognition algorithms on flies' search trajectories, and genetic manipulation to test the roles of specific cells in the central complex of the fly brain during path integration behaviors like local searches after encountering food. The awardee will construct a testable navigation circuit model describing cell functions to advance understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying executive functions compromised in disorders like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. Work will begin June 1, 2022 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.