The Anthropocene era have experienced one imminent problem disrupting our ecosystem and its living organisms, climate change. Climatic changes and atmospheric pollution altered insect distributions and behaviour. Thus, pest insects expand to new crops, mosquitos spread diseases into new areas, while pollinators are decreasing in abundance. These new developments have, unfortunately, severe effects on ecological interactions, biodiversity, natural communities as well as human health.
Ozone is one of the atmospheric pollutants that exhibits increased levels in the past years and is expected to increase even further. We are therefore interested in investigating how insects, in our case vinegar flies, react and cope with elevated levels of ozone in the environment and whether this has any impact on their nervous system and in particular on sensory processing. We therefore study the olfactory preferences, activity, longevity and fecundity of flies exposed to levels of ozone normally present in polluted areas. My talk will summarize our recent findings on the impact of ozone exposure on the structure and function of the olfactory pathway of Drosophila.