Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Türkiye
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2016
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Öğrenci: Barış Serhan
Eş Danışman: Annette Hohenberger, ANNETTE EDELTRAUD HOHENBERGER
Özet:The fruit fly -Drosophila melanogaster- is one of the most popular model organisms for translational neuroscience and medicine. The monoamines like dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin that modulate cognitive processes have homologs in the fly brain. The availability of genetic tools that enable selective manipulation of aminergic neurons in the fly brain provide an enormous advantage to study the neural circuits underlying cognitive processes. In our experiments, the role of dopaminergic modulation in the allocation of attention between two sensory modalities -vision and taste- was addressed by using a cross-modal attention protocol. First, the effects of food deprivation and stimulus parameters on the probability of responding to a looming stimulus versus feeding were assayed. Then, the flies that were mutants for different types of dopaminergic or octopaminergic receptors/transporters were tested to understand the involvement of amine modulators in attentional allocation. Finally, a particular mutation on a dopamine (i.e. Dop1R1) receptor gene was examined in order to pinpoint the state-dependent responsiveness and the cross-modal suppression in the Drosophila model, which might underlie preliminary characteristics of attention in any attention-like mechanism.