Chronobiology
Author: Chiara Costa | email: chcostapetrillo@gmail.com
Chiara Costa 1°, Marcos Sorrentino 1°, Esteban J. Beckwith 2°, Nicolás Pírez 1°2°
1° Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular; Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
2° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; UBA-CONICET, Argentina
The interactions that individuals undergo with conspecifics are critical for their wellbeing. In Drosophila melanogaster, the social context, defined as the size, sex and genotype composition of the group affects aggression, sleep, feeding, alcohol consumption and the daily pattern of locomotor activity. Specifically, the olfactory system plays a crucial role in the capacity of social cues to synchronize the internal circadian clock. Therefore, the goal of this project is to dissect the mechanisms that underlie locomotor activity entrainment by social interactions. As a first step, we replicated behavioral experiments and evaluated if social interactions were sufficient to entrain flies that were originally in different activity phases. We performed experiments using the wild-type strains Canton-S and w1118, which have different eye colors, entrained in light schedules 6 h apart. We individually recorded the activity of male and females flies for six days after a week of social interactions in groups of different compositions, always in free-running conditions. Preliminary results show that Canton-S flies that were 6 hours delayed were able to re synchronize the w1118 population. Future experiments will include different light schedules and compositions of the interacting populations. We will employ genetic tools to discover the nature of the signal and its receptors in the olfactory system, and map the components of the olfactory system that contact the circadian pacemaker.