Reprogramming behaviour: Flexible assembly of object identification circuits

Identical visual stimuli elicit different responses across animals, depending on the species or life stage. However, the visual circuits that enable early object interpretation, such as retinal cell types and their target brain nuclei, tend to be conserved. How, then, can these basic building blocks of brains be flexibly combined to achieve variability of innate behaviours? Using the metamorphosis of Xenopus laevis, where filter-feeding tadpoles transform into predatory frogs, I aim to identify how neural circuits are flexible assembled to generate diverse behaviours. I will ask: 1. How does stimulus representation in the brain change during natural behavioural reprogramming? 2. Which wiring changes underlie these functional shifts? 3. Can they be used to reprogram behaviour? I hypothesize that behavioural reprogramming relies on evolutionarily conserved retinal circuits that flexibly change their connectivity patterns in the brain during metamorphosis to enable the behavioural switch from prey to predator. I will test this hypothesis using 2photon eye and brain imaging in tadpoles and frogs, neuronal tract tracing, transcriptome-based cell type identification, and transgenic tools for circuit manipulation. This project aims to uncover how building blocks of the brain can be flexibly assembled, to achieve the behavioural diversity we see across development and evolution.