Andreas S Thum

My lab investigates learning and memory in Drosophila larvae given that the larva brain is small enough to study its function at the level of microcircuits and single cells. At the same time the larva is complex enough to compare its brain with those of other insects or even humans (Thum and Gerber, 2019). To analyze the behavioral, anatomical and molecular changes that allow larvae to remember past experiences, we apply a large number of different techniques: behavioral tests (including various procedures to analyze memory phases), opto- and thermogenetic approaches to manipulate the activity of small sets of neurons and individual nerve cells, as well as different molecular and neurogenetic methods (e.g. the split-Gal4 system) to selectively target single cells in the living animal. We combine this work with confocal light microscopy to investigate the morphology of single neurons in the entire larval brain (Lyutova et al. 2019; Saumweber et al. 2018; Rohwedder et al. 2016). More recently, the focus of the lab shifted to connectomics by using 3D EM techniques to reconstruct the entire wiring diagram of the larval brain (Eichler et al. 2017). Thus, my group has established a large set of different strategies to analyze the larval memory center in terms of molecular and genetic mechanisms, cellular and synaptic networks and behavior.