Professor Carolina Rezaval has been awarded a Wellcome Discovery Award for £2.9 million to investigate how the brain makes decisions under competition.
Fruit fly
Competition is a defining feature of life and profoundly shapes how animals behave. When rivals are nearby, they often become more motivated and take greater risks to secure vital resources such as food, mates, or territory. But what happens in the brain when competition arises?
The eight-year research programme led by Professor Rezaval will use the fruit fly Drosophila, a powerful model for studying brain function, to tackle this question.
Using advanced imaging and genetic tools, the Rezaval lab will monitor and manipulate neurons in the fly brain to test the idea that competitive environments create a distinct brain state that can push animals to take greater risks in pursuit of critical opportunities.
One of the most fundamental unanswered questions at the intersection of neuroscience and evolutionary biology is how competition influences decision-making. Animals are continually faced with choices, such as whether to eat, escape danger, explore their surroundings, or rest.
The Rezaval lab looks at how the presence of a rival can dramatically alter how these choices are made. For instance, an animal might usually choose to flee from danger rather than stop to feed, but if a competitor is nearby, the value of the food increases and the animal may take risks it would normally avoid in order to secure it.
We want to understand what happens in the brain when it senses competition for the most fundamental biological necessities – food for survival, and a mating partner for reproduction. We want to establish whether competition acts as a ‘master motivation’, reorganising the brain’s priorities and deciding which behavioural instincts wins. I am grateful to Wellcome for supporting this ambitious project. I would also like to thank the current and former members of my lab; this award builds on their hard work and the discoveries they have made.
The Rezaval Laboratory will use a new neural model in fruit flies to explore, at an incredibly detailed cellular and synaptic level, how competition is detected in the brain and how this leads to behaviour change.
The project builds on recent advances in mapping the fruit fly brain, including a detailed map known as the Drosophila connectome, together with imaging tools developed by the Rezaval Lab to observe individual neurons as flies make decisions during competition.
The team will also examine whether past social experiences leave lasting imprints in the brain that shape how animals respond to competition, and whether these mechanisms operate similarly in male and female flies and across different behaviours.
The Wellcome Discovery Awards support established researchers and teams to pursue bold and creative research programmes that aim to deliver significant advances in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing. The scheme provides flexible, long-term funding that enables researchers to develop ambitious ideas, explore new concepts and generate discoveries that can transform their field.
Professor of Neurogenetics
Professor Carolina Rezaval uses the fruit fly Drosophila to study the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying behavioural choices
