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SUMMARY:BMI Progress Reports 2021 // Dr. Jacsik 's Lab\, Riddha Manna "Art
 ificial selection for cognitive ability in Drosophila melanogaster"
DTSTART:20211201T121500
DTEND:20211201T130000
DTSTAMP:20260510T111858Z
UID:4e47dec5643a0f79344463ecd0379edccc5ac155c9f72d9cf36f968f
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Riddha Manna\, Jaksic Lab – Experimental Evolutionary Neurob
 iology\nHuman evolution spans almost 9 million years\, starting from the d
 ivergence from the Pan genus leading to “behavioral modernity\,” chara
 cterized by the emergence of human extreme cognitive ability. Some parts o
 f human evolutionary progress correspond to major ecological and geographi
 cal changes\, suggesting that the evolution of human intelligence is adapt
 ive. On the other hand\, the evolution of human intelligence might be a co
 rrelated outcome of anatomical evolution and behavioral and social evoluti
 on\, which can be adaptive as well as non-adaptive. However\, evidence of 
 any of these hypotheses is sparse or based on observed correlations. For o
 ur purpose\, we define cognition broadly as the ability to learn or unders
 tand or to deal with new or trying situations through the process of acqui
 ring knowledge and understanding through memory\, experience\, and the sen
 ses. In our lab\, we aim to approach these hypotheses experimentally to un
 derstand the evolution of cognition in a holistic manner considering its b
 eneficial\, neutral\, and even detrimental roles in the overall evolution 
 of an organism. While studying evolution in nature can be confounding\, es
 pecially in terms of segregating the effects of the evolution of different
  traits\, experimental evolution and laboratory natural and artificial sel
 ection provide powerful tools to analyse the effects of individual traits\
 , cognition in this case. In this talk\, we will focus on the development 
 of a setup that allows us to perform behavioural assays in high throughput
  using an industrial collaborative robot and to artificially select for in
 dividuals with a higher cognition than the population. Artificial selectio
 n allows us to circumvent the fitness cost of evolving higher cognitive ab
 ility\, which may occur in a natural setting. The ultimate aim of this stu
 dy is to compare artificially selected populations with a population evolv
 ing under natural selective pressure in order to identify and characterize
  genetic and physiological constraints for evolution of cognitive ability.
  We will discuss the evolve and re-sequence strategy to track the genetic 
 changes during experimental evolution and the benefits of using the model 
 organism Drosophila melanogaster.\n 
LOCATION:Online
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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