Genetic Dissection of Sexual Behaviour

All animals must continuously sequence and coordinate behaviours appropriate to their environment and internal state to survive and reproduce.

Dissecting the neural substrates that initiate, organise, and terminate these behavioural sequences is critical to understanding behaviour. As an innate adaptive behaviour that involves multimodal sensory integration, learning through experience, and the appropriate execution of discrete motor programs, courtship behaviour in Drosophila has proven to be an outstanding genetic model for understanding how a compact circuit coordinates these critical action sequences.

Our group is interested in understanding how sexually dimorphic neural circuits are functionally assembled and how they integrate information to generate appropriate sex-specific responses.

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