Laxmi Yadav, M.S.

Laxmi Yadav graduated in 2018 with honors in biotechnology from Vidya Prasarak Mandal’s B.N. Bandodkar College of Science in India. She earned her master’s degree in biotechnology from the University of Mumbai in 2020 in the lab of Kakoli Bose at the Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer. Her master’s degree work focused on studying the role of the HTRA3 protein in oncogenesis and apoptosis. With seven years of teaching experience, she was appointed a visiting faculty member at the University of Mumbai in 2021. Afterward, she joined Debasis Das’s group as a junior research fellow at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Her research focused on deciphering the mechanism of neuronal exocytosis by standardizing techniques to investigate the kinetics of SNARE complex formation. In 2023, she moved to the University of Vienna as a doctoral student in Manuel Zimmer’s group. For her Ph.D. studies, she investigates the role of active sensing via nose oscillations and sniffing in C. elegans in the context of explorative and chemotaxis behaviors.

Principal Investigator: Manuel Zimmer

Fellow: Lisa Sippl

Undergraduate Fellow Project:

Active sensing controls the dynamics of closed-loop interaction between the brain, body and the environment. Animals devise strategies like sniffing, whisking or saccadic eye movements to couple these active motor behaviors to perception. The ethological advantages of active sensing, however, are incompletely understood. Like other animals, C. elegans also perform various exploratory behaviors to find food sources like bacteria. In Zimmer’s lab, we observed striking head-casting movements and oscillations of the nose. I hypothesize that these behaviors are active sampling movements crucial for the worm to find food. In the current study, I investigate the impact of head casts and nose oscillations on perception and food chemotaxis. To achieve these aims, I am combining genetics with calcium imaging and optogenetics in a close loop with unrestrained behavior. I propose that addressing these questions in the tractable model organism C. elegans will lead to new generalizable insights into the ethological importance of active sensing.