email turner@cshl.edu, phone (516) 367-5041, fax (516) 367-8880

What constitutes a memory?  When we learn an association, information from two different sensory streams is somehow bound together in the brain.  For example, the smell of spoiled milk vividly evokes the taste of an injudicious gulp.  How are odor and taste information represented in terms of neural spike trains, and how does learning modify those representations to form associative links between stimuli?

In my lab we address these questions by using a combination of electrophysiological, genetic, and computational approaches in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. We directly monitor activity of neurons in the brain of an intact fly with whole cell patch clamp recordings. Using molecular genetic techniques we can manipulate neural activity to directly test our predictions about neural coding, both at the level of spike trains and behavior.

We focus on the representations of smell and taste. Drosophila learn to avoid a particular odor when that odor is presented in combination with a bitter taste. What changes in neural activity underlie this learning? What synapses change strength, and what ion channel properties change?

Our long-term goal is to understand how neuronal plasticity alters cellular and population level stimulus representations to link together information from different sensory modalities.