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A female Drosophila melanogaster pheromone is recognized by males from both the same and a closely related species through conserved peripheral sensory neurons; the signal is then differentially propagated to promote conspecific and suppress interspecies courtship.

Peripheral and central circuit adaptations can be flexibly coordinated in Drosophila, and such a modular circuit organization may facilitate the evolution of mate recognition systems by allowing novel sensory modalities to become linked to male arousal.

A cryo-electron microscopy structure of the insect Orco subunit, which forms ion channels with diverse olfactory receptors, reveals a tetrameric cation channel and sheds light on insect olfaction.

By recording from the Drosophila mushroom body during active odor navigation, Zolin et al. reveal that dopaminergic reinforcement pathways encode rewards and goal-directed actions through similar patterns of neural activity and dopamine release.

Specific neurons in the fly brain that are activated when males are aroused modulate visual processing to underlie courtship.

Structural and functional analysis of an insect olfactory receptor shed light on how receptors can be activated by diverse odorants.

A connectome analysis identifies, and experiments confirm, three state-dependent circuit motifs that modify the response of an aggressive female Drosophila or a courting male to fly-sized visual objects.

Despite marked behavioural differences between the sexes, surprisingly few anatomic features have been observed that differentiate the male and female brain in any species. But this study unveils a sexual dimorphism in the neuronal circuit responding to a pheromone, which induces different courtship behaviours in male and female fruitflies. The single neuron tracing technique that has been developed to do so should be useful to study the nervous systems of other genetically tractable species.

Innate differences between male and female behaviours must be inscribed in their respective genomes, but how these encode distinct neuronal circuits remains largely unclear. Focusing on sex specific responses to the cVA pheromone in fruitflies, a chain of four successive neurons carrying olfactory signals down to motor centres has been identified, with all male to female anatomical differences lying downstream of a conserved sensory cell. The techniques developed should help others in the task of neuronal circuit mapping, which remains daunting even for the relatively simple fly brain.

In Drosophila, olfactory sensory neurons project to spatially invariant loci (glomeruli) and stereotyped circuitry is maintained in projections to a brain centre thought to mediate innate behaviours; here it is shown that neurons of the mushroom body, a centre that translates olfactory information into learned behaviours, integrate input from an apparently random combination of glomeruli, which could allow the fly to contextualize novel sensory experiences.