Fan-shaped body neurons are involved in period-dependent regulation of long-term courtship memory in Drosophila
- 1Department of Biological Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan
- 2Department of Anesthesia, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA
- 3Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs in Genetics and Neuroscience, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA
Abstract
In addition to its established function in the regulation of circadian rhythms, the Drosophila gene period (per) also plays an important role in processing long-term memory (LTM). Here, we used courtship conditioning as a learning paradigm and revealed that (1) overexpression and knocking down of per in subsets of brain neurons enhance and suppress LTM, respectively, and (2) suppression of synaptic transmission during memory retrieval in the same neuronal subsets leads to defective LTM. Further analysis strongly suggests that the brain region critical for per-dependent LTM regulation is the fan-shaped body, which is involved in sleep-induced enhancement of courtship LTM.
Footnotes
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↵4 Corresponding author
E-mail sakai-takaomi{at}tmu.ac.jp
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
- Received August 9, 2012.
- Accepted August 24, 2012.
- © 2012 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
