题    目: Towards understanding the construction of neural circuits for spatial cognition
报告人: Cheng Lyu, Ph.D.
Stanford Science Fellow, Stanford University
时  间: 4月14日（周一）13:00-14:00
地    点: 吕志和楼B101
主持人: 罗冬根 教授

摘要:
In this talk, I will describe how fruit flies can further our understanding of spatial cognition. In the first half, I will talk about the work from my phd thesis where we discovered a group of neurons that explicitly signals the fly’s traveling direction in the world. I will also experimentally demonstrate that the fly brain computes this traveling direction signal through a two-dimensional vector sum process. In the second half, I will switch to talk about how some fly neural circuits are assembled, work from my postdoc research. In particular, I will show that the fly brain employs the dimensionality reduction strategy to reduce the complexity of neural circuit wiring process. I will also demonstrate how we completely rewired a fly neural circuit through genetic manipulations and this rewiring induces specific physiological and behavioral consequences.

报告人简介：

Cheng Lyu earned his bachelor’s and master's degrees in the Department of Physics from Peking University. Mentored by Dr. Fangting Li and Dr. Tiejun Li from the Mathematics Department, Cheng worked on developing computational methods to analyze the metastability of gene regulatory networks. Later, Cheng transitioned to experimental work and completed his Ph.D. training in Gaby Maimon’s lab at Rockefeller University. In Gaby’s lab, he studied the neural basis for path integration in the Drosophila central complex and discovered a neuronal circuit consisting of 8 cell types that constructs the fly’s traveling direction signal via a two-dimensional vector addition process. Currently, Cheng is a Stanford Science Fellow and is working in Liqun Luo’s lab at Stanford, where he is studying how neural circuits are precisely assembled during development. In particular, he is attempting to completely rewire individual groups of olfactory neurons in flies from one target to another, which could result in changes in the fly’s behavioral response to the same odors.