Aversive olfactory conditioning with NaCl induces middle-term memory in Drosophila melanogaster larvae
Md. Zeeshan Ali, Anushree and Jawaid Ahsan
Drosophila Behavioral Laboratory, Department of Biotechnology, Central University of South Bihar, Gaya–824 236 (India) *Corresponding author: Name: Jawaid Ahsan Phone: +91- 8521627799 E-mail: jahsan@cub.ac.in
ABSTRACT
The Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as fruit fly, more correctly termed as the vinegar fly, has been extensively used as a powerful model organism for elucidation of various biological mechanisms in higher organisms including humans. To analyze associative learning, the olfactory classical conditioning using D. melanogaster larva is widely used in the field of behavioral neuroscience. The larva is simpler than adult with minimalistic neural network which make it an ideal model organism to elucidate the associative plasticity circuitry, physiology, and signaling. In this work, we have employed one robust training paradigm for associative olfactory conditioning. We describe the olfactory learning and memory formed using sodium chloride (NaCl) as the aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) and the odorant ethyl acetate (EA) as the conditioned stimulus (CS). Our results show that the association of EA/NaCl led to the formation of a middle-term memory (MTM) in fruit fly larvae. The learning acquired was strong and interestingly remained significant even after 3 hours of conditioning