Memory formation enables organisms to guide their behavior  based on past experience and learning. Habituation, a form of non associative learning enables an organism to ignore the familiar stimuli so that sensory information is gated.  Our group studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms of olfactory habituation in Drosophila. Work form our group has identified a central synapse (PN-LN) that undergo inhibitory potentiation which underlie habituation.

In my project I initially looked at the role of excitatory projection neurons in activating inhibitory interneurons, which was found to drive a recurrent inhibition in the antennal lobe  that is key to inducing habituation. Latter part of my work involved studying two disease associated proteins FMRP and Ataxin2 for their role in habituation. Here we found that FMRP and Atx2 had shared and distinct roles in translational regulation of memory associated CaMKII in postsynaptic and presynaptic neurons. Ongoing efforts are aimed at understanding the role of low complexity domains found predominantly on RNA regulatory proteins in the assembly of RiboNucleoProtein (RNP) particles that are sites of neuronal translational control and in habituation.