Research Projects

Mood and anxiety disorders affect over 300 million people worldwide, with major stressful events like the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating these conditions. Animal models can help understand the neurobiological basis of mood disorders, such as depression, by demonstrating depression-like behavior in animals exposed to chronic stress, maternal separation, and learned helplessness. For example, repeated social defeat stress in rodents triggers a depression-like state in Drosophila melanogaster. The study aims to explore if repeated social defeats induce depression-like behavior in flies, as well as in mice, to assess if they alter the motivation of flies to engage in courtship, explore novel objects, and escape threatening stimuli. Changes in feeding and metabolism in loser flies will be measured, as major depressive disorder increases metabolic disturbances. The study also plans to use the Drosophila aggression paradigm to study depression-like behavior in females, as violence against women is a major public health problem that increases the likelihood of mental illnesses, including mood disorders. The researchers plan to induce social defeat stress in females to study sex-specific differences in the underlying biology of depressive disorder. sleep disturbances in depressed patients affect their quality of life and are a vital risk factor for suicide. sleep deprivation ameliorates depression-like symptoms in patients, but a mechanistic understanding of the link between sleep and depression is not well understood. The study aims to assess the effect of repeated social defeats on sleep, study the role of impaired sleep on depression-like behavior, and identify the neuronal, genetic, and molecular factors affecting sleep in depressed flies.