Rebecca Chung-Hui Yang

Journal Article Curr Biol · January 8, 2024 A new study examines how Helicoverpa armigera females detect chemicals released by conspecific eggs in order to avoid laying more eggs on the same substrate. This work opens new avenues for basic research inquiries and offers a potential strategy for contr ... Full text Link to item Cite

A functional division of Drosophila sweet taste neurons that is value-based and task-specific.

Journal Article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · January 18, 2022 Sucrose is an attractive feeding substance and a positive reinforcer for Drosophila But Drosophila females have been shown to robustly reject a sucrose-containing option for egg-laying when given a choice between a plain and a sucrose-containing option in ... Full text Link to item Cite

A neuropeptidergic circuit gates selective escape behavior of Drosophila larvae.

Journal Article Curr Biol · January 10, 2022 Animals display selective escape behaviors when faced with environmental threats. Selection of the appropriate response by the underlying neuronal network is key to maximizing chances of survival, yet the underlying network mechanisms are so far not fully ... Full text Link to item Cite

Molecular control limiting sensitivity of sweet taste neurons in Drosophila.

Journal Article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · October 1, 2019 To assess the biological value of environmental stimuli, animals' sensory systems must accurately decode both the identities and the intensities of these stimuli. While much is known about the mechanism by which sensory neurons detect the identities of sti ... Full text Link to item Cite

Learning a Spatial Task by Trial and Error in Drosophila.

Journal Article Curr Biol · August 5, 2019 The ability to use memory to return to specific locations for foraging is advantageous for survival. Although recent reports have demonstrated that the fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster are capable of visual cue-driven place learning and idiothetic path ... Full text Link to item Cite

Sweet neurons inhibit texture discrimination by signaling TMC-expressing mechanosensitive neurons in Drosophila.

Journal Article Elife · June 11, 2019 Integration of stimuli of different modalities is an important but incompletely understood process during decision making. Here, we show that Drosophila are capable of integrating mechanosensory and chemosensory information of choice options when deciding ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Serotonergic Modulation Enables Pathway-Specific Plasticity in a Developing Sensory Circuit in Drosophila.

Journal Article Neuron · August 2, 2017 How experiences during development cause long-lasting changes in sensory circuits and affect behavior in mature animals are poorly understood. Here we establish a novel system for mechanistic analysis of the plasticity of developing neural circuits by show ... Full text Link to item Cite

Serotonergic Modulation Enables Pathway-Specific Plasticity in a Developing Sensory Circuit in Drosophila.

Journal Article Neuron · August 2, 2017 Full text Link to item Cite

Sensory integration and neuromodulatory feedback facilitate Drosophila mechanonociceptive behavior.

Journal Article Nat Neurosci · August 2017 Nociception is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism to encode and process harmful environmental stimuli. Like most animals, Drosophila melanogaster larvae respond to a variety of nociceptive stimuli, including noxious touch and temperature, with stereotyp ... Full text Link to item Cite

H2O2-Sensitive Isoforms of Drosophila melanogaster TRPA1 Act in Bitter-Sensing Gustatory Neurons to Promote Avoidance of UV During Egg-Laying.

Journal Article Genetics · February 2017 The evolutionarily conserved TRPA1 channel can sense various stimuli including temperatures and chemical irritants. Recent results have suggested that specific isoforms of Drosophila TRPA1 (dTRPA1) are UV-sensitive and that their UV sensitivity is due to H ... Full text Link to item Cite

High Throughput Assay to Examine Egg-Laying Preferences of Individual Drosophila melanogaster.

Journal Article J Vis Exp · March 24, 2016 Recently, egg-laying preference of Drosophila has emerged as a genetically tractable model to study the neural basis of simple decision-making processes. When selecting sites to deposit their eggs, female flies are capable of ranking the relative attractiv ... Full text Link to item Cite

Drosophila TRPA1 isoforms detect UV light via photochemical production of H2O2.

Journal Article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · October 20, 2015 The transient receptor potential A1 (TRPA1) channel is an evolutionarily conserved detector of temperature and irritant chemicals. Here, we show that two specific isoforms of TRPA1 in Drosophila are H2O2 sensitive and that they can detect strong UV light v ... Full text Link to item Cite

Analyzing animal behavior via classifying each video frame using convolutional neural networks.

Journal Article Sci Rep · September 23, 2015 High-throughput analysis of animal behavior requires software to analyze videos. Such software analyzes each frame individually, detecting animals' body parts. But the image analysis rarely attempts to recognize "behavioral states"-e.g., actions or facial ... Full text Link to item Cite

Long-duration animal tracking in difficult lighting conditions.

Journal Article Sci Rep · July 1, 2015 High-throughput analysis of animal behavior requires software to analyze videos. Such software typically depends on the experiments' being performed in good lighting conditions, but this ideal is difficult or impossible to achieve for certain classes of ex ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Behavioral and circuit basis of sucrose rejection by Drosophila females in a simple decision-making task.

Journal Article J Neurosci · January 28, 2015 Drosophila melanogaster egg-laying site selection offers a genetic model to study a simple form of value-based decision. We have previously shown that Drosophila females consistently reject a sucrose-containing substrate and choose a plain (sucrose-free) s ... Full text Link to item Cite

Egg-laying demand induces aversion of UV light in Drosophila females.

Journal Article Curr Biol · December 1, 2014 Drosophila melanogaster females are highly selective about the chemosensory quality of their egg-laying sites, an important trait that promotes the survival and fitness of their offspring. How egg-laying females respond to UV light is not known, however. U ... Full text Link to item Cite

Mechanosensitive neurons on the internal reproductive tract contribute to egg-laying-induced acetic acid attraction in Drosophila.

Journal Article Cell Rep · October 23, 2014 Selecting a suitable site to deposit their eggs is an important reproductive need of Drosophila females. Although their choosiness toward egg-laying sites is well documented, the specific neural mechanism that activates females' search for attractive egg-l ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Unveiling the secrets to her heart.

Journal Article Neuron · July 2, 2014 Before consenting to copulate, a female fruit fly gauges both her mating status and her suitor's quality. Three recent studies, Bussell et al. (2014) in Current Biology and Feng et al. (2014) and Zhou et al. (2014) in this issue of Neuron, dissected the re ... Full text Link to item Cite

Female contact modulates male aggression via a sexually dimorphic GABAergic circuit in Drosophila

Journal Article Nature Neuroscience · January 1, 2014 Intraspecific male-male aggression, which is important for sexual selection, is regulated by environment, experience and internal states through largely undefined molecular and cellular mechanisms. To understand the basic neural pathway underlying the modu ... Full text Cite

The Drosophila Cadherin Fat regulates tissue size and planar cell polarity through different domains.

Journal Article PLoS One · 2013 The Drosophila Cadherin Fat (Ft) has been identified as a crucial regulator of tissue size and Planar Cell Polarity (PCP). However, the precise mechanism by which Ft regulates these processes remains unclear. In order to advance our understanding of the ac ... Full text Link to item Cite

Control of the postmating behavioral switch in Drosophila females by internal sensory neurons.

Journal Article Neuron · February 26, 2009 Mating induces changes in the receptivity and egg-laying behavior in Drosophila females, primarily due to a peptide pheromone called sex peptide which is transferred with the sperm into the female reproductive tract during copulation. Whereas sex peptide i ... Full text Link to item Cite

Drosophila egg-laying site selection as a system to study simple decision-making processes.

Journal Article Science · March 21, 2008 The ability to select a better option from multiple acceptable ones is important for animals to optimize their resources. The mechanisms that underlie such decision-making processes are not well understood. We found that selection of egg-laying site in Dro ... Full text Link to item Cite

Projections of Drosophila multidendritic neurons in the central nervous system: links with peripheral dendrite morphology.

Journal Article Development · January 2007 Neurons establish diverse dendritic morphologies during development, and a major challenge is to understand how these distinct developmental programs might relate to, and influence, neuronal function. Drosophila dendritic arborization (da) sensory neurons ... Full text Link to item Cite

The development of neuronal morphology in insects.

Journal Article Curr Biol · September 6, 2005 Neurons are highly polarized cells with some regions specified for information input--typically the dendrites--and others specialized for information output--the axons. By extending to a specific location and branching in a specific manner, the processes o ... Full text Link to item Cite

Fidelity in planar cell polarity signalling.

Journal Article Nature · January 30, 2003 The polarity of Drosophila wing hairs displays remarkable fidelity. Each of the approximately 30,000 wing epithelial cells constructs an actin-rich prehair that protrudes from its distal vertex and points distally. The distal location and orientation of th ... Full text Link to item Cite

Regulation of Frizzled by fat-like cadherins during planar polarity signaling in the Drosophila compound eye.

Journal Article Cell · March 8, 2002 Planar polarity is evident in the coordinated orientation of ommatidia in the Drosophila eye. This process requires that the R3 photoreceptor precursor of each ommatidium have a higher level of Frizzled signaling than its neighboring R4 precursor. We show ... Full text Link to item Cite

mirror controls planar polarity and equator formation through repression of fringe expression and through control of cell affinities.

Journal Article Development · December 1999 The Drosophila eye is divided into dorsal and ventral mirror image fields that are separated by a sharp boundary known as the equator. We have previously demonstrated that Mirror, a homeodomain-containing putative transcription factor with a dorsal-specifi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Integration specificities of two lambdoid phages (21 and e14) that insert at the same attB site.

Journal Article J Bacteriol · September 1997 It was shown previously that phage 21 and the defective element e14 integrate at the same site within the icd gene of Escherichia coli K-12 but that 21 integrase and excisionase excise e14 in vivo very infrequently compared to excision of 21. We show here ... Full text Link to item Cite

mirror encodes a novel PBX-class homeoprotein that functions in the definition of the dorsal-ventral border in the Drosophila eye.

Journal Article Genes Dev · April 15, 1997 The Drosophila eye is composed of dorsal and ventral mirror-image fields of opposite chiral forms of ommatidia. The boundary between these fields is known as the equator. We describe a novel gene, mirror (mrr), which is expressed in the dorsal half of the ... Full text Link to item Cite