Mala Murthy, an associate professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute faculty scholar, leads a team of researchers who are investigating how the brain processes social cues by looking at the courtship interactions of the vinegar fly.
Mala Murthy(Link is external) is leading a team of Princeton researchers that has received a $2.2 million grant(Link is external) to investigate the brain’s mechanisms at work in social interactions between two animals, from processing each other’s cues to generating complex behaviors in response.
The research was selected by the National Institutes of Health for funding related to the federal Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative(Link is external).
“The BRAIN Initiative is absolutely critical for supporting pioneering projects like ours that aim to uncover fundamental principles of brain function,” Murthy said.
Impairments in processing social information and generating appropriate responses underlie several human disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and autism spectrum disorder. The work will focus in particular on the courtship interactions of the vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
“During courtship, flies both process myriad sensory cues from their partner and generate a number of dynamic behaviors, including the production of courtship songs,” Murthy said. The researchers will use this model system to uncover general principles of neural circuit function that will inform studies of sensorimotor integration in more complex systems.
The BRAIN Initiative is a large-scale effort to push the boundaries of neuroscience research and equip scientists to understand and treat a wide variety of brain disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, autism and traumatic brain injury.
The highly interdisciplinary project involves state-of-the-art methods in neural circuit analysis, behavioral analysis and theoretical modeling, so the researchers assembled “a multi-PI group” that covers all relevant expertise: Murthy(Link is external) herself, an associate professor of molecular biology(Link is external) and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI)(Link is external) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute faculty scholar; William Bialek(Link is external), the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics(Link is external) and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics (LSI)(Link is external); Jonathan Pillow(Link is external), an associate professor of psychology(Link is external) and the PNI; and Joshua Shaevitz(Link is external), a professor of physics and the LSI.