Research Projects

Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) in the animal nervous system are responsible for repetitive locomotor behaviors like walking, flying, and swimming. They can also underlie more complex behaviors like communication signals, which are relevant to understanding human communication. Bushcrickets, Orthopteran insects that generate sexual advertisement calls by rubbing their wings together, are an excellent model system to study CPGs. Insect song is an unlearned behavior, predictable in output sequence regardless of conditioning, and its temporal patterns originate from neural circuits that are genetically and developmentally hardwired. Insect neural systems are smaller and more tractable than larger bird and mammal model systems used to study learned vocal communication. The evolution of neural circuits producing song could be easily tracked, uncovering the neurodevelopmental and functional consequences of song-altering mutations and tracking the ways they are subjected to natural selection and sexual selection. The proposed model bushcricket system, Mecopoda elongata, with considerable call pattern divergence, is proposed as the putative CPG site. To locate these CPGs, researchers will retrograde stain the neural pathway from the wing to the brain and use neuropharmacological tools and electrophysiology to confirm the functional roles of these CPGs. They will sequence putative candidate genes implicated in song production and use PCR and in-situ hybridization to confirm the presence of transcripts and gene manipulation to check for resultant modifications in the temporal patterns of calls. These results will not only further our understanding of vocal communication evolution but also contribute to clinically relevant interventions for disorders in communication or CPG-related patterns such as breathing and walking.