Caron Lab
Principal Investigator: Sophie Caron
Institution: University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Uncovering fundamental mechanisms of neuronal connectivity that enable associative brain centers to learn efficiently is an important goal of neuroscience. In the mushroom body — the associative brain center in Drosophila melanogaster — the constituent Kenyon cells receive input from olfactory projection neurons. Each projection neuron connects to one of the 51 glomeruli forming the antennal lobe, the primary olfactory processing center in the Drosophila brain. Our previous work has shown that these connections are random in that there are no sets of glomeruli converging preferentially onto a given Kenyon cell. However, the glomeruli are not represented with equal frequency among Kenyon cell inputs. Certain glomeruli are significantly overrepresented or underrepresented, even though a uniform distribution would be optimal for learning performance. We are proposing to test the hypothesis that this non-uniform distribution — which we call 'biased randomness' — serves an important biological function, namely to predispose the learning ability of the mushroom body towards certain ethologically pertinent stimuli. To test this hypothesis, we will first compare the represe…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01NS107970-08: Biased randomness: a fundamental connectivity mechanism for associative brain centers. (2026)
- 5R01NS107970-07: Biased randomness: a fundamental connectivity mechanism for associative brain centers. (2025)
- 2R01NS107970-06A1: Biased randomness: a fundamental connectivity mechanism for associative brain centers. (2024)
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