Congratulations to Bijayalaxmi Swain for her new affiliation as PhD student from 1 January 2020 in Philipsborn group

Bijayalaxmi will be working with Neuronal control of sexual dimorphic acoustic signaling behavior during Drosophila reproduction. And the study of the interneuron circuits and the pre-motor to motor connections involved in male song. She will characterise the function of interneurons involved in male song by a behavioural experiments (song recording) combined with genetic manipulation of defined neuronal classes by neuronal silencing, optogenetic activation, RNAi mediated knockdown of neurotransmission genes or feminisation by expression of genes of the sex determination pathway. Furthermore, she will establish an anatomical atlas of interneurons and integrate it into the previously published atlas of motor neurons assembled in the lab. For this, neurons will be imaged by confocal microscopy and 3 D reconstructed after non-rigid image registration (for methods, se O’Sullivan et al. 2018). She also plan to analyse the connectivity of neurons by activity dependent GRASP (Gfp reconstitution across synaptic partners, cit) and combined activation and calcium imaging experiments.