Abstract:

Mate choice often involves social learning which can lead to the copying of another individuals’ choice (i.e., mate copying). While mate copying occurs in many taxa, we are only beginning to understand the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Here, we show in Drosophila melanogaster that the rutabaga gene is necessary to support mate copying. rutabaga encodes a Ca2+/calmodulin-sensitive adenylyl cyclase (AC-Rut+) that acts as coincidence detector of conditional and unconditional stimuli in associative learning. Since classical and operant learning require AC-Rut+ expression in different brain areas, we determine the functional localisation of AC-Rut+ for mate copying by artificially expressing AC-Rut+ in neural subsets of a rutabaga mutant. We found that adult AC-Rut+ expression in γ-Kenyon cells (KCs) of the mushroom bodies (MBs) during learning and short-term memory (STM) is sufficient to support mate copying. Thus, it requires the same KCs as nonsocial Pavlovian learning, suggesting that the pathways of social and nonsocial learning overlap significantly. We then used the same approach to study long-term memory (LTM) and found that AC-Rut+ expression is sufficient in /- and γ-KCs, which is identical to nonsocial aversive (but not appetitive) LTM. Our study opens a new research avenue to unravel the full pathways of social learning.

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