Have you ever thought why your shopping cart looks completely different if you entered the supermarket hungry or after eating a big meal?

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This behavioral phenomenon is regulated by motivation, which is the topic of our studies

Motivation is a neuronal representation of physiological need states, like hunger, thirst and sex drive, that promote goal-directed behaviors aimed to obtain food, water and successful mating. However, the role of motivation is not simply to control what we do but to determine when, how much and for how long we perform actions, which is critical  for animals that don’t have a refrigerator nearby and need to constantly integrate risk of predation and competition over resources to survive and reproduce.

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This is why motivation related mechanisms originated early in evolution and are highly conserved from simple to complex organisms.

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This also means that there are specific mechanisms in the nervous system that can encode the exact amount of drive and decode or translate it into the proper behavioral output.

Understanding these mechanisms have implications also for human health, as there are disorders in which there is an uncoupling between the precise need and resulting actions, for instance eating disorders where the extent of eating is either below or above the physiological need. 

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Our lab uses Drosophila to investigate how motivation is encoded across different scales, from genetic programs within single neurons, through molecular mechanisms that shape what genes are expressed and how they function in single neurons, how does that affect neuronal physiology, circuits and ultimately behavior.