Department of Zoology

Principal Investigators

Research area - Neurobiology

My research focuses on the evolution of neural circuits. I am interested both in the underlying causes and consequences of changes in both the physiology and anatomy of neural circuits. Almost nothing is known about the types of changes that have occurred during evolution in neural circuits. Even less is know about how changes in neural circuits affect the behaviours these circuits generate. To assess the diversity of neural circuits my studies concentrate on two circuits in which it is possible to relate the activity of neurons to specific behaviours – the photoreceptors of insects (and in particular flies) and the neural circuits that control the movements of the legs in grasshoppers, crickets and bush crickets. By assessing changes in both the anatomy and physiology of species and relating them to behavioural differences and the known evolutionary relationships between these species we can begin to understand the patterns of change.

My research on the causes of changes in neural circuits focuses on one particularly important factor – energy. Limitations on the amount of energy available for neural processing have profound consequences for the evolution of neural circuits in terms of both anatomy and physiology. In particular, energy limitation means that nervous systems should be reduced to the minimum possible and recent work in our lab has suggested that there are severe energetic penalties for excess capacity in neurons.

We are combining a variety of electrophysiological methods, including intracellular recording and staining of identified neurones, with behavioural techniques (including high speed video analysis) and comparative methods to approach these problems.

Research group - Neural circuits: design, function and evolution

Selected publications

• Niven JE, Graham CM, Burrows M (2008), “Diversity and evolution of the insect ventral nerve cord”, Annual Review of Entomology 53 : 253-71

• Niven JE , Anderson JC, Laughlin SB (2007) , “Fly photoreceptors demonstrate energy-information trade-offs in neural coding”, PLoS Biology 5:828–40 Niven JE (2007), “Brains, islands and evolution: breaking all the rules”, Trends Ecol. Evol. 22:57-9.
• Vahasoyrinki M*, Niven JE* , Hardie RC, Weckstrom M, Juusola M (2006), “Robustness of neural coding in Drosophila photoreceptors in the absence of slow delayed rectifier K + channels”, Journal of Neuroscience 26:2652-60
• Niven JE , Scharlemann JPW (2005), “Do insect metabolic rates at rest and during flight scale with body mass?” Biology Letters 1:346-49
• Niven JE , Vahasoyrinki M, Juusola M, French AS (2004), ”Interactions between light-induced currents, voltage-gated currents, and input signal properties in Drosophila photoreceptors”, Journal of Neurophysiology 91:2696-706
• Niven JE (2004), “Channelling evolution: canalization and the nervous system” PLoS Biology 2: 22-24
• Juusola M, Niven JE, French AS (2003), “Shaker K + channels contribute early nonlinear amplification to the light response in Drosophila photoreceptors”, Journal of Neurophysiology 90:2014-21
• Niven JE ,Vahasoyrinki M, Juusola M (2003), “ Shaker K +-channels are predicted to reduce the metabolic cost of neural information in Drosophila photoreceptors”, Proc. R. Soc. B 270:S58-61
• Niven JE , Burrows M (2003) , “Spike width reduction modifies the dynamics of short-term depression at a central synapse in the locust”, Journal of Neuroscience 23:7461–9
• Niven JE* , Vahasoyrinki M*, Kauranen M, Hardie RC, Juusola M, Weckstrom M (2003) , “The contribution of Shaker K + channels to the information capacity of Drosophila photoreceptors”, Nature 421:630–4

*Authors contributed equally