Learning, memory and social behavioR
Bosco lab outside of Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, 2018
The mushroom body of the adult Drosophila brain is shown above and is labeled with green fluorescent protein. Flies learn about the presence of predators and then talk about it with their neighbors!
As a graduate student at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, under the mentorship of Dr. Giovanni Bosco (http://www.boscogeneticslab.com/), my primary studies were on learning, memory, and social behavior in Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit fly). For learning and memory, we utilized an ecologically relevant stimulus (a predatory wasp), to elicit a non-associative memory, that we analyzed for decay following exposure across time. Using this assay, we find an age dependent decline of memory maintenance.
For social behaviors, we find that flies exposed to predators engage in social interactions whereby naive flies learn and remember as if they had seen the predator. We have proposed that this social behavior constitutes a fly “language” and have observed both intraspecies and interspecies communication to exist throughout the genus Drosophila.
Dartmouth College
Presenting at CBR@D
What We've Achieved
2019 N Zhou, Y Jiang, TR Bergquist, AJ Lee, BZ Kacsoh, AW Crocker, KA Lewis, G Georghiou, HN Nguyen, MN Hamid, L Davis, The Critical Assessment of Function Annotation, B Rost, SE Brenner, CA Orengo, CJ Jeffery, G Bosco, DA Hogan, MJ Martin, C O'Donovan, SD Mooney, CS Greene, P Radivojac, I Friedberg (2019) The CAFA challenge reports improved protein function prediction and new functional annotations for hundreds of genes through experimental screens. Genome Biology. doi: doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1835-8. PMID:
2019 Bozler J, Kacsoh BZ, Bosco G (2019) Maternal Priming of Offspring Immune System in Drosophila. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. doi: doi.org/10.1534/g3.119.400852. PMID:
2019 Kacsoh BZ, Bozler J, Hodge S, Bosco G (2019) The neural circuitry of learning dialects in a Drosophila language. Communications Biology. doi: doi.org/10.1038/s42003-019-0557-5. PMID: 31428697
2019 Bozler J, Kacsoh BZ, Bosco G (2019) Transgeneratonal inheritance of ethanol preference is caused by maternal NPF repression eLife. doi: doi.org/10.7554/eLife.45391. PMID: 31287057
2019 Kacsoh BZ, Barton S, Jiang Y, Mooney SD, Friedberg I, Radivojac P, Greene CS, Bosco G (2018) New Drosophila long-term memory genes revealed by assessing computational function prediction methods. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. doi: doi.org/10.1534/g3.118.200867. PMID: 30463884
2018 Kacsoh BZ, Bozler J, Bosco G (2018) Drosophila species learn dialects through communal living. Plos Genetics. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007430. PMID: 30024883
Preview: Manak JR (2018) Multiculturalism is good for flies, too. Plos Genetics. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007480
2017 Bozler J, Kacsoh BZ, Bosco G (2017) Nematocytes: Discovery and characterization of a novel anculeate hemocyte in Drosophila falleni and Drosophila phalerata. Plos One. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188133. PMID: 29141015
2017 Bozler J*, Kacsoh BZ*, Chen H, Theurkauf WE, Weng Z, Bosco G (2017) A systems level approach to temporal expression dynamics in Drosophila reveals clusters of long term memory genes. Plos Genetics. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1007054. PMID: 29084214
2017 Kacsoh BZ, Greene CS, Bosco G (2017) Machine Learning Analysis Identifies Drosophila Grunge/Atrophin as an Important Learning and Memory Gene Required for Memory Retention and Social Learning. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. doi.org/10.1534/g3.117.300172 . PMID: 28889104
2016 Allaway RJ, Fischer DA, de Abreu FB, Gardner TB, Gordon SR, Barth RJ, Colacchio TA, Wood M, Kacsoh BZ, Bouley SJ, Cui J, Hamilton J, Choi JA, Lange JT, Peterson JD, Padmanabhan V, Tomlinson CR, Tsongalis GJ, Suriawinata A, Greene CS, Sanchez Y, Smith KD (2016) Genomic characterization of patient-derived xenograft models established from fine needle aspirate biopsies of a primary pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and from patient-matched metastatic sites. Oncotarget. 7(13):17087-102. doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.7718. PMID: 26934555
2015 Kacsoh BZ*, Bozler J*, Ramaswami M, Bosco G (2015) Social communication of predator-induced changes in Drosophila behavior and germ line physiology. eLife. May 13, 2015. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.07423. PMID: 25970035
2015 Kacsoh BZ, Bozler J, Hodge S, Ramaswami M, Bosco G (2015) Non-Associative Long-Term Memory Formation in Drosophila Requires Mushroom Body Specific Functions to Maintain Predator-Induced Changes in Oviposition Behavior. Genetics. April 1, 2015 vol. 199 no. 4 1143-1157, doi:10.1534/genetics. 114.172221. PMID: 25633088