Dr Temur Yunusov

Interests

Locomotion in Drosophila melanogaster larva requires coordinated output of motorneurons that drive the contractions of the body wall muscles. The dendrites of motorneurons in the Ventral Nerve Cord are oganised to form a 'myotopic' representation of the body wall muscles in the periphery. Much less is known about the interneurons that generate locomotor rhythms and provide input to the motorneurons, their origin, their projection and connectivity paterns. It is also not known how the myotopic organisation of motorneuron dendrites translates to patterns of connections at other levels of the network.

To address these issues, I use the Drosophila melanogaster larval motor system to study the basic organisational principles of interneurons presynaptic to motorneurons. I use genetic tools available in Drosophila to label and manipulate subsets of pre-motor interneurons and study their morphology, connectivity and contribution to locomotion.

Ventral Nerve Cord of a freshly-hatched Drosophila larva. GFP (green) is expressed in only 2 cells per hemi-segment, one of them is filled with DiI (magenta) revealing the cell morphology
Click image to view full-size

Research Focus

Equipment

Behavioural analysis

Confocal microscopy

Fluorescence microscopy

Immunohistochemistry

Intracellular DiI injections

Microscopy