Flies, Worms, and Robots: Combining Perspectives on Minibrains and Behavior (2014)

This conference focused on the latest developments in Drosophila systems neuroscience and their application to biomimetics and biorobotics. It followed the successful 2010 ESF-EMBO symposium "Functional Neurobiology in Minibrains" (meeting report: Cobb, EMBO reports 2011, 389), which fostered new interactions within an interdisciplinary community of molecular biologists, ecologists and engineers. The meeting explored progress made during the past 4 years towards a multi-level understanding of how the fly brain functions. We examined how behaviour emerges from neural circuit computations, how these principles can inspire new technologies and how biologists can benefit from robotics to rigorously test mechanistic hypotheses. As this undertaking necessitated new methods, we included researchers on another genetic model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans, in which many interdisciplinary approaches have been pioneered that could be readily transferred to Drosophila.