Dissecting visuomotor transformations in Drosophila
	Damon A. Clark Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology Room: KBT 1215A Phone: 203-432-5978 Email: Lab: http://clarklab.commons.yale.edu

GFP expressed in a small number of cell types in the fly’s brain. Genetic tools in Drosophila allow us to target and manipulate neurons with exquisite specificity.

A secured fly walking on a ball. We develop behavioral tests of perception that are used in combination with neural manipulations to characterize visual circuitry.

We are interested in how networks of neurons perform computations. In order to dissect a neural computation, one must understand the task being performed, control the network’s inputs, and manipulate the system’s component parts. The fruit fly’s visual-motor transformations serve as an ideal model in which we can hope to follow neural processing as the brain transforms a visual stimulus into a behavioral output. In order to uncover principles and mechanisms of visual processing, we create novel stimuli, measure fly behavior, monitor neural activity, and employ genetics to manipulate circuit function. In particular, we want to understand how animals extract motion information from the complex spatio-temporal visual patterns in the natural world, and how they make decisions based on that information. We want to characterize and model how the system computes at an algorithmic level, and also to use the battery of genetic tools in the fruit fly to discover the neural and biophysical mechanisms that implement those algorithms. By comparing fly algorithms and mechanisms to vertebrate ones, we can look for evolutionary constraints and diversity in solutions to basic computational tasks.

Selected Publications

Omura, D. T., Clark, D. A., Samuel, A. D. T., Horvitz, H. R. (2012), “Dopamine signaling is essential for precise rates of locomotion by C. elegans”, PLoS ONE 7(6): e38649.

Clark, D. A., Burztyn, L., Horowitz, M., Schnitzer, M., Clandinin T. R. (2011) “Defining the computational structure of the motion detector in Drosophila”, Neuron 70(6): 1165-1177.

Wernet, M. F., Velez, M. M., Clark, D. A., Baumann-Klausener, F., Brown, J. R., Klovstad, M., Labhart, T., Clandinin, T. R. (2011), “Genetic Dissection Reveals Two Separate Retinal Substrates for Polarization Vision in Drosophila”, Current Biology 22: 12-20.

Clark, D. A., Gabel, C. V., Gabel, H., Samuel, A. D. T. (2007) “Temporal activity patterns in thermosensory neurons of freely moving C. elegans encode spatial thermal gradients”, J. Neuroscience 27(23): 6083-6090.

Clark, D. A.*, Gabel, C. V.*, Lee, T. M., Samuel, A. D. T. (2007) “Short-term adaptation and temporal processing in the cryophilic response of Caenorhabditis elegans”, J. Neurophys. 97(3): 1903-1910. (*Equal contributions)

Chung, S. H.*, Clark, D. A.*, Gabel, C. V., Mazur, E., Samuel, A. D. T. (2006) “The role of the AFD neuron in C. elegans thermotaxis analyzed using femtosecond laser ablation”, BMC Neuroscience 7:30. (*Equal contributions)

Clark, D. A., Grant, L. C. (2005) “The bacterial chemotactic response reflects a compromise between transient and steady state behavior”, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 102(26): 9150-9155.

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