On June 29th, Science published a report from ION entitled “Dopamine-Mushroom Body Circuit Regulates Saliency-Based Decision Making in Drosophila”. This study was conducted in the Laboratory of Learning & Memory, by graduate students Ke Zhang, Jian-zeng Guo, Yue-qing Peng and Xi Wang under the supervision of Dr. Ai-ke Guo.

Drosophila melanogaster can make appropriate choices among alternative flight options based on the relative salience of competing visual cues. This paper reported that this salience-based choice behavior requires the mushroom body and the dopaminergic system. Immunohistological analyses showed that mushroom bodies are densely innervated by dopaminergic axons, which suggests the cooperation between these two neural components in choice behavior. Furthermore, the authors also show that this salience-based choice behavior consists of early and late phases; the former requires activation of the dopaminergic system and mushroom bodies, while the latter is independent of these activities. Thus, the dynamic circuit from the dopamine system to mushroom bodies is crucial for choice behavior in Drosophila. This study in Drosophila may help us to understand high level cognitive processing in general.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China, the Multidisciplinary Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Basic Research Program of China, and the Knowledge Innovation Engineering Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

decision-making in flight simulator with cues of color and position

mushroom bodies' lobes are densely innervated by dopaminergic fibers