The gentle hum of an oversized incubator greets all who enter the Scaplen Lab on the top floor of Bryant University’s Unistructure. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in early October and Elisabeth Hartzfeld ’25 — one of Kristin Scaplen, Ph.D.’s, student researchers — looks intently through one of the lab’s microscopes before moving to a nearby computer, where four graphs record realtime data on the fruit flies buzzing in a black box to her right.
Scaplen, a neuroscientist and assistant professor of Psychology within Bryant’s School of Health and Behavioral Sciences, has a long-held interest in understanding how the brain alters experiences in our recollection; she uses fruit flies (also known as Drosophila) to conduct her research. In September, she received a $431,918 three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to support her neuroscience research project titled “Neural Circuitry Mechanisms Underlying Maladaptive Reward Memories in Drosophila.” She’ll be using the funds to home in on what alters a memory to make it strong, weak, or forgotten.
“Our current research program studies how memories for alcohol intoxication are formed. These are incredibly strong memories and are thought to underline the insatiable cravings that haunt people struggling with addiction,” says Scaplen, who is the first independent recipient of an NIH grant at Bryant. “This is important because, if we can understand how the brain works and how it is disrupted in the context of things like alcohol, then we can start to ask questions about how we can fix the brain.”
Despite millions of years of evolution, the basic connections in the human brain are still similar to those of a fruit fly. But while humans have 87 million neurons in their brains, fruit flies only have 100,000 — making their brains easier for researchers to study.
“Flies are a powerful model for studying how the activity of specific neurons in the brain orchestrates behavioral responses because the field has developed genetic tools that allow us to precisely target individual neurons in the brain and manipulate their activity,” Scaplen says. “For instance, using these tools, we can momentarily silence or activate a neuron and see in real time how that neuron impacts a behavioral response. We can do this simply by raising the temperature of the room or shining red light on the fly at very specific times. This is powerful because it is simply not possible in other model organisms.”
In upcoming experiments, conducted in collaboration with Brown University researchers, the lab will use high-powered microscopes to visualize the activity of neurons in the brain when flies are exposed to alcohol.
Researchers will also investigate how the activity of neurons important for alcohol-related memories change as flies learn that odor cues predict alcohol intoxication and form memories of these experiences.
