PhD student
melissa.pitzalis@universite-paris-saclay.fr
Thesis project
In the animal world, the vital ability to discriminate between noxious items and nutritious substances is attained through the detection of a wide range of volatile and non-volatile chemicals. While olfaction assists individuals in the initial orientation towards potential foods, the ultimate arbiter deciding for ingestion or rejection of an item is the sense of taste. Understanding how the central nervous system processes and encodes gustatory information has significant implications in neuroethology. One well-established insect model in neuroscience, behavioural, and ecological studies that makes an interesting candidate for the study of gustatory processing is the honey bee, Apis mellifera. In fact, honey bees are eusocial animals that evolved sophisticated food-related behaviours, and in which the individuals’ nutritional needs must be tuned to the collective needs of the colony.
Despite the intensive research devoted to other sensory modalities like olfaction and vision, comparatively a limited amount of works has set off to explore the machineries behind gustatory processing in Apis mellifera. In addition, the sequencing of the honey bee genome revealed a scarcity of gustatory receptor genes compared to other insect species equipped with several dozens of GRs and with poorer gustatory behavioural outputs. This scarcity raises an intriguing question: how can such a rich gustatory behavioural output arise from such a reduced set of gustatory input channels? The answer may lie in the mechanisms with which the brain of the honey bee processes, encodes and interprets gustatory information.
By integrating neuroanatomical, behavioural, and neurophysiological approaches, my goal is to unravel the mechanisms underlying the central processing of gustatory information in honey bees, bridging the gap between behaviour and its neural substrates. Eventually, this research will provide a deeper understanding of the adaptive mechanisms employed by honey bees to modulate their feeding behaviour, and that contribute to the output of sophisticated food-related behaviours typical of the species.
Scientific communications
- 2024, oral communication – 19th International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste [Reykjavík, Iceland]
- 2024, oral communication –24th meeting of the Club of Insect Neurobiology [Gif-sur-Yvette, France]
- 2023, oral communication – Neuroethology Satellite Meeting of Neurofrance [Lyon, France]
- 2023, poster presentation –9th ed. of the Doctoral School Day [Gif-sur-Yvette, France]
- 2023, poster presentation – 15th Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society [Göttingen, Germany]
Education & employment history
- 2022-2025, PhD student, Université Paris-Saclay
- Gustatory processing in the brain of the honey bee Apis mellifera
- 2022, Calcium Imaging and Neuroanatomy assistant, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
- 2022, Master degree in Evolution of Animal and Human Behaviour, University of Turin
- The olfactome partition in the honey bee brain: exploring neural activity patterns through multisite calcium imaging on genetically engineered Apis mellifera.
- 2021, Internship, University of Bristol (UK):
- Comparative neuroanatomy in Heliconiini butterflies: how neurogenesis has been altered to bring about a massive increase in the number of neurons in the mushroom bodies
- 2021, Internship, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
- Exploring neural activity patterns through multisite calcium imaging on genetically engineered Apis mellifera
- 2020-2025, Teaching assistant, University of Turin (Italy) & Université-Paris-Saclay
- 2019, Docent guide, El Castillo (Costa Rica)
- 2019, Bachelor degree in Natural Sciences, University of Turin