Slippery issue

What is your greatest research ambition? I want to 'watch' behaviour happening in the nervous system of an intact or semi-intact fruit fly. This will require instrumentation that will allow us to record optically from brain neurons with previously defined functions. We will soon have available many of the cell lines needed to perform these experiments. Many technical hurdles remain before the experiments actually can be carried out — not the least of which is obtaining access to the required two-photon imaging system — but it still amazes me that, by switching to fruit flies, we now can actually think about performing experiments that were only dreamed of such a short time ago. What do you think are the big questions to be answered next in your field? Behaviour happens in stereotypical patterns which switch from one to the other along statistically determinable lines. Even though we can recognize and score these patterns and they are recognizable and meaningful to other members of the species, each time an animal shows a pattern of behaviour, it is different. We know and continue to learn a great deal about how the 'wiring diagrams' of nervous systems are assembled — clearly transcriptional codes are key elements in that assembly. But the wiring diagrams only represent the scaffolding on which behaviour is constructed. Much less is known about how the scaffolding is assembled into simple pattern generating circuits, although elegant work from Michael Bate's laboratory at the University of Cambridge is beginning to make major contributions in that arena. Still less is known about how these simple patterns are assembled into the complex behavioural patterns noted by observers of animal behaviour. I anticipate that the next decades will see major advances in this arena too, as investigators begin to address questions of how behaviour gets wired into nervous systems — what are the roles of genes? hormones? experience? Once the patterning machinery is established, a next key step will be, how does behaviour work and how is it molded by experience. Willem Wijnstekers, secretary-general of Cites. " Many people derive a substantial living from fishing for them, while others are involved in the aquaculture which grows the fish to marketable size. All this is under threat unless fishing for European eels is put on a more sustainable footing. " Older eels are caught for their meat but glass eels, an early stage of eel …