Expanding on years of mushroom body literature, Ahmed et al provide new context to fill in gaps and offer a framework of how to position drosophila mushroom body translationally. Many of the behavioral and imaging phenotype results were not novel in this study. We have known about associative learning in the mushroom body and many have used it as a model for studying learning and memory. The results demonstrating changing Kenyon cell numbers affecting performance in odor discrimination is not new. What is new in this study is the framework and experimental evidence for considering the mushroom body as an expansion layer. They show that the key parameters for discrimination and generalization of sensory information are the number of sensory inputs that each neuron in an expansion layer receives and the ratio between sensory channels and expansion layer neurons.
references
- Ahmed, M., Rajagopalan, A. E., Pan, Y., Li, Y., Williams, D. L., Pedersen, E. A., Thakral, M., Previero, A., Close, K. C., Christoforou, C. P., Cai, D., Turner, G. C., & Clowney, E. J. (2023). Input density tunes Kenyon cell sensory responses in the Drosophila mushroom body. Current Biology, 33(13), 2742-2760.e12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.05.064