Event:

Olfactory systems are continuously barraged with odors, varying in their structure, physicochemical properties, and concentration. Detecting and making sense of such a complex chemical landscape poses a distinct challenge to the fundamental flexibility of the nervous system. We have been using olfaction as a window into the mechanisms of adaptive behavior, leveraging the concise olfactory circuits of Drosophila to reveal how animals can detect, perceive, and navigate the vast chemical world. In recent work, we developed a closed-loop olfactory paradigm that allows head-fixed Drosophila to navigate arbitrary chemical landscapes, shedding light on the basic neural and behavioral algorithms of olfactory plume navigation. By combining functional imaging, precise perturbations of neural activity and behavioral modeling, we show that plume navigation represents a spatial navigation task in which animals integrate memories of their past olfactory encounters with their current sense of space to shape their navigational strategies.