Research in the Hoopfer Lab is focused on understanding how social behaviors are encoded in the brain. My research combines techniques from molecular biology, genetics, and animal behavior to study the genes and neural circuits that regulate social behavior like aggression and courtship. Projects in the lab use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to investigate the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate these behaviors and the underlying brain states that influence them.
Current research is focused on identifying the neural circuits that mediate aggressive behavior. To do this, we are using genetic techniques to label neurons that show increased activity when flies are fighting. This genetic labeling technique allows us to characterize the morphology of these populations using confocal microscopy and activate or inhibit their firing in order to understand how they affect aggressive behavior. A second research focus is on understanding how neuromodulators motivate flies to engage in social behaviors. We are using associative learning assays combined with genetic manipulation of neuronal activity to investigate the neuromodulators that underlie reward states associated with social behaviors like mating and courtship.
To learn more about how we are using fruit flies to understand social behavior, check out this video on work that I did as a postdoctoral fellow in David Anderson’s lab at Caltech.
Eyjólfsdóttir E, Branson S, Burgos-Artizzu XP, Hoopfer ED, Schor J, Anderson DJ, Perona P. (2014) Detecting Social Actions of Fruit Flies. In Computer Vision – ECCV 2014, D. Fleet, T. Pajdla, B. Schiele, and T. Tuytelaars, eds. (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 772–787.
