Aurore Avarguès-Weber

The Young Investigator Award of the French IUSSI (International Union for the Study of Social Insects) has been awarded to Aurore Avarguès-Weber.

This prize is granted for the achievements of her PhD thesis performed at the CRCA and of her post doctoral stage performed at Queen Mary University London.

Simon Garnier, which is now based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in collaboration with Christian Jost and Guy Theraulaz from team DYNACTOM and Maud Combe from CRCA have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

They aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources.

The study focused mainly on how Argentine ants behave and coordinate themselves in both symmetrical and asymmetrical pathways.

Simon Garnier

In nature, ants do this by leaving chemical pheromone trails. This was reproduced by a swarm of micro-robots, called “Alices”, leaving light trails that are detected by digital video cameras.

Garnier, S. Combe, M., Jost, C. & Theraulaz, G.

"Do ants need to estimate the geometrical properties of trail bifurcations to find an efficient route? A swarm robotics test bed"

Plos Computational Biology, 8: e1002903.

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In the context of spatial orientation and navigation, honey bees use chromatic information available in the sky dome to find their way between food sources and the hive.

The principles of chromatic coding in a specific structure of visual pathways in the bee brain, the anterior optic tuberculum (AOTu), have been uncovered by a research team of the Research center on Animal Cognition (CRCA) at the University of Toulouse III, together with colleagues of the University of Arizona. These results published in The Journal of Neuroscience suggest that this brain structure could play a fundamental role as chromatic compass in bee navigation.

Theo Mota

Theo Mota, Wulfila Gronenberg, Martin Giurfa, Jean-Christophe Sandoz, "Chromatic processing in the anterior optic tubercle of the honey bee brain", The Journal of Neuroscience (2013)

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During his PhD, Nicolas Massaly demonstrated the involvement of targeted protein degradation in opiate addictive behaviors.

Nicolas Massaly

This work was supervised by Pr Bernard Frances from the team “Memory Aging Plasticity” in collaboration with Lionel Mouledous (IPBS, Toulouse) and researchers in Bordeaux (V. David, INCIA) and Poitiers (M. Solinas, IBPC).

This work has been published in NeuroPsychoPharmacolgy thanks to the involvement of many members of the team MAP and especially that of Lionel Dahan.

Massaly N, Dahan L, Baudonnat M, Hovnanian C, Rekik K, Solinas M, David V, Pech S, Zajac JM, Roullet P, Mouledous L, Frances B.

"Involvement of Protein Degradation by the Ubiquitin Proteasome System in Opiate Addictive Behaviors."

Neuropsychopharmacology. 2012 November 21.

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