Caron Lab

Research focus

NIH R01 · 2025

Biased randomness: a fundamental connectivity mechanism for associative brain centers.

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…

From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.