Invitation Only
Speaker: Marla Sokolowski, Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
Title: Should I Stay or Should I Go? Unravelling Gene-environment Interplay in Behavior
We are interested in how DNA variation predisposes individuals to be more or less affected by their experiences (gene-environment interactions), how our experience gets embedded in our biology and how DNA variation interacts with epigenetic processes to affect behavioral variation. Experiential effects can occur on different time scales. For example, nutritional or social adversity (or enrichment) can occur throughout an organism’s life, in early life alone with enduring effects on later life stages, or acutely over a matter of minutes or hours. Our approach provides interesting opportunities and challenges because many genes and pathways that modulate behavior are pleiotropic, they have multiple functions and do themselves exhibit plastic responses to experience. Recently we have uncovered the molecular basis of behavioural pleiotropy of the foraging gene in Drosophila melanogaster.