Marco Gallio, Ph.D.

Research

My lab researches the neural mechanisms that guide fruit flies known as Drosophila toward an environment of a preferred temperature and humidity —and how other aspects of their behavior, such as how well they sleep, are impacted by changes in external conditions. In the first stages of our work, we used the laboratory model fly Drosophila melanogaster to map the brain circuits that process temperature information shaping a variety of behaviors: from navigation in a complex thermal environment, to avoidance of potentially dangerous heat, to changes in sleep/wake rhythms that accompany seasonal changes in external temperature. More recently, the lab has expanded to study additional Drosophila species (as well as other insect species) adapted to life in different—even extreme—thermal conditions, ranging from cold habitats to hot, dry deserts. Our goal is to understand how the responses to temperature have evolved to allow the insects to thrive in a range of diverse thermal environments—quite an impressive evolutionary feat for such small, cold-blooded animals.

As an Innovation Fund investigator, Marco Gallio, Ph.D., is teaming up with Juan Du, Ph.D., to study the molecular and structural changes by which an ion channel that initially functioned as a bitter receptor in Drosophila became repurposed over time as a dedicated heat sensor—and continued to evolve as the species adapted to different thermal habitats. This work combines the Du lab’s expertise in structural biology with the Gallio lab’s extensive experience in neurogenetics and neurophysiology. Together, the investigators aim to uncover how a receptor could be co-opted to sense a completely different stimulus and how species-specific properties evolve to match environmental demands. They hope to define how evolution repurposes molecular components to create new sensory receptors, offer structural insight into a fundamentally new class of thermosensors, and establish a framework to understand how temperature is detected at the molecular and cellular level to drive species-specific behaviors.