Drosophila olfaction across space and time

The sense of smell is crucial for most animals and serves as a significant model system in biological research, ranging from neuronal information processing to developmental biology.

Over the past 15-years, significant progress has been made in understanding the organization and operation of the olfactory system, particularly in the genetic model organism Drosophila melanogaster (vinegar fly). Despite the wealth of information gathered, the functional significance of the observed organization remains unknown.

The proposed project has three main aims to address fundamental issues regarding how the fly´s sense of smell operates: 1) Decipher the evolution of the drosophilid odorant receptors (OR) over deep time, 2) Determine how the ORs decode the environment, and 3) Investigate OR function under the Anthropocene.

The first aim will use comparative genomics to trace the evolution of the OR family across Drosophilidae, identifying species-specific and generally important ORs.

The second aim will examine the function of these two OR groups by expressing orthologs across Drosophilidae and screening them with volatiles from D. melanogaster´s ancestral habitat.

The third aim will trace the evolution of D. melanogaster´s species-specific ORs across space and time, investigating the effects of colonizing novel environments and anthropogenic habitat changes using museomics and old pinned specimens.