Sara M Wasserman

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of California, Los Angeles

Maintaining stable gaze while tracking moving objects is commonplace across animal taxa, yet how diverse ecological needs impact these processes is poorly understood. During flight, the fruit-eating fly Drosophila melanogaster maintains course by making smooth steering adjustments to fixate the image of the distant visual background on the retina,...

A new study reveals an unanticipated role for social context in driving group behavior of a solitary species to a sensory stimulus and is mediated by mechanosensory neurons signaling touch interactions among individuals. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

It is well established that perception is largely multisensory [1]; often served by modalities such as touch, vision, and hearing that detect stimuli emanating from a common point in space [2, 3]; and processed by brain tissue maps that are spatially aligned [4]. However, the neural interactions among modalities that share no spatial stimulus domai...

Carbon dioxide (CO(2)) elicits an attractive host-seeking response from mosquitos [1-3] yet is innately aversive to Drosophila melanogaster [4, 5] despite being a plentiful byproduct of attractive fermenting food sources. Prior studies used walking flies exclusively, yet adults track distant food sources on the wing [6]. Here we show that a fly tet...

Tracking distant odor sources is crucial to foraging, courtship and reproductive success for many animals including fish, flies and birds. Upon encountering a chemical plume in flight, Drosophila melanogaster integrates the spatial intensity gradient and temporal fluctuations over the two antennae, while simultaneously reducing the amplitude and fr...

The neuronal mechanisms that encode specific stimulus features in order to elicit defined behavioral responses are poorly understood. C. elegans forms a memory of its cultivation temperature (T(c)) and exhibits distinct behaviors in different temperature ranges relative to T(c). In particular, C. elegans tracks isotherms only in a narrow temperatur...

Analysis of temperature-driven transcripts. (A) Comparison of qRT-PCR (gray) and microarray expression array (black) data of randomly selected WC-driven transcripts. The probability of significance of circadian cycling (pF24) as compared to a randomized dataset was calculated by appending each independent dataset. There are two probe sets each for...

Analysis of light- and temperature-entrained transcripts. (A) Comparison of qRT-PCR (gray) and microarray expression array (black) data of arbitrarily selected light- and temperature-entrained transcripts. The probability of significance of circadian cycling (pF24) as compared to a randomized dataset was calculated by appending each independent mic...

False discovery rate analysis of datasets. (0.11 MB DOC)

Transcripts of C. elegans clock genes do not oscillate in a circadian manner. (0.06 MB DOC)

Phases of transcripts from the WC-driven datasets. Animals were entrained to the indicated T-cycles for 3 d and RNA was collected on the fourth day. qRT-PCR data for each time point are the average of two technical replicates from one biological experiment. (0.84 MB TIF)

nlp-36p::gfp expression does not cycle upon light entrainment. Fluorescence intensities in wild-type animals (gray bars) or tax-2 mutant animals (red bars) carrying the nlp-36p::gfp transgene entrained to light cycles (LD/DD). Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean (s.e.m). Data shown are from two independent experiments. (0.18 MB TIF)

GO categories and lists of all light- and temperature-driven transcripts. (1.18 MB XLS)

Fourier analyses of periods at different temperatures. (0.06 MB DOC)

GO categories and lists of all light- and temperature-entrained transcripts. (0.47 MB XLS)

Most organisms have an endogenous circadian clock that is synchronized to environmental signals such as light and temperature. Although circadian rhythms have been described in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans at the behavioral level, these rhythms appear to be relatively non-robust. Moreover, in contrast to other animal models, no circadian tra...

Caenorhabditis elegans navigates thermal gradients by using a behavioral strategy that is regulated by a memory of its cultivation temperature (T c). At temperatures above or around the T c, animals respond to temperature changes by modulating the rate of stochastic reorientation events. The bilateral AFD neurons have been implicated as thermosenso...

A memory of prior thermal experience governs Caenorhabditis elegans thermotactic behavior. On a spatial thermal gradient, C. elegans tracks isotherms near a remembered temperature we call the thermotactic set-point (T(S)). The T(S) corresponds to the previous cultivation temperature and can be reset by sustained exposure to a new temperature. The m...