CPBF Seminar Series: Marie Suver⏐Vanderbilt University

Multisensory integration and motor control for active sensing
Date
Apr 14, 2025, 12:30 pm1:30 pm
Location
Audience
Physics/Biophysics faculty, post docs, grad students

Speaker

Details

Event Description

For stable navigation, animals must coordinate ongoing sensory acquisition with motor output. Sensory acquisition can be tuned by active movement of sensors, increasing efficiency, volume or accuracy of sensory information. Further, additional information from several sensory modalities can contribute to stable movement, and influence motor control across multiple bodyparts; this creates both a challenge and opportunity for efficient neural control of behavior. Understanding how these processes are orchestrated by the brain is essential for unraveling the neural basis of coordinated movement, yet how this is implemented at the cellular and circuit level is not fully known. My lab leverages genetic tools, connectomic datasets, quantitative behavior and whole cell patch clamp recordings in behaving flies to unravel these complexities of sensory-motor coordination. I will present work from my lab showing how visual information (wide-field optic flow) is integrated with frontal airflow to control active mechanosensation in flying flies, and an updated model for how these computations could be implemented in the brain. We have also recently built a library of genetic lines for labeling and perturbing antennal motor neurons, and I will present this new resource alongside connectomic and physiological analyses of premotor networks. Together with preliminary work using high resolution imaging of the segmented multisensory Drosophila antennae, we are building a holistic understanding for how active multisensory integration is coordinated with motor control.