Tel: 01 69 15 68 26
Topics:
Being social insects, honeybees use pheromones to ensure intraspecific communication allowing colony cohesion in a wide range of contexts: queen retinue, brood care, foraging, colony defense, swarming, etc. Honeybees constitute an interesting model to study the neurobiological basis of pheromonal processing, as the anatomy of the honey bee brain has been well characterized. Despite increasing knowledge already acquired on olfactory processing in this species, the nature of pheromonal coding is still poorly understood. Knowledge from other insects suggests that pheromones would be detected and processed by highly-specific and isolated subsystems (“labeled lines”) while general odorants would be encoded in a combinatorial fashion (“across-fiber pattern”). But, with such a plethora of different pheromonal compounds, more than most insects, can the bee brain really harbor as many labeled lines? Or did this social insect evolve a more cost-effective strategy using combinatorial coding of pheromone information?
To answer these questions, I study the responses of individual olfactory receptors and attempt to determine their ligands (receptor deorphanization). To this aim, we use heterologous expression in the “empty neuron system” of Drosophila, coupled to transcuticular calcium imaging and electrophysiological recordings.
Publications and scientific communications:
2023 Poster presentation – ESITO (Villasimius,Italy)
2023 Poster presentation – Goettingen meeting, German neurosciences society (Goettingen, Germany)
2022 Oral communication – ECRO (Berlin, Germany)
2022 Oral communication – IUSSI (San Diego, USA)
Past experiences:
– Master 2 internship, Mons University, Mons, Belgium (D.Michez) Title: “Pesticides effects on feeding behavior of bumblebees”
– Master 1 internship, CEFE, Montpellier, France (M.Dufray) Title: “Geographical variation of floral scents of species with variable pollinator communities” , with a publication https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.13984