Top
-
Primary Faculty
Contact
- Department of Biology
- 229 Gilmer Hall
- 485 McCormick Road
- P.O. Box 400328
- Charlottesville, VA 22904
DEFOREST MELLON, JR.
EDUCATION
RESEARCH INTERESTS
All animals simultaneously process information from multiple kinds of sense organs (modalities) and combine much of it in the central nervous system in an operation referred to as multimodal processing. Multimodal processing underlies some of our own perceptions, e.g., the 'flavors' and textures of foods, and is also critically important in executing movements that guide complex behaviors, e.g., playing a musical instrument. I am interested in how multimodal inputs are combined at the neuronal level within the brain. I use the freshwater crayfish as an animal model to examine how hydrodynamic and chemosensory inputs are combined within the crayfish deutocerebrum, a brain region that processes odorant and hydrodynamic inputs from the antennule. Acute antennule-brain preparations are maintained physiologically while neuronal activity is monitored in response to chemical and fluid-flow multimodal stimuli. We are interested in the effects of fluid-flow direction along the antennules on the response properties of brain neurons, and whether certain regions along the antennular chemoreceptor array are more sensitive to dissolved odorants than others . A recent interest is in mechanisms that assure coincident arrival of action potentials at their central targets from widely dispersed sense organs. Analysis of acquired data is accomplished by generating intensity response functions, statistical analysis of spiking frequency, intracellular staining of central neurons with fluorescent probes, and the use of fluorescent antibodies to stain neuronal synaptic transmitters.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
Mellon, DeF., Reidenbach, M.A. (2011) Fluid Mechanical Problems in Crustacean Active Chemoreception. In Barth, F., Humphrey, J.A.C., Srinivasan, M. (eds) Frontiers in Sensing Springer-Verlag, New York.