Nilay Yapıcı

Nilay Yapici (born 1981) is a Turkish neuroscientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she is the Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and Adelson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. Yapici studies the neural circuits underlying decision making and feeding behavior in fruit fly models.

Early life and education Yapici was born in Samsun, Turkey in 1981. She attended Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey studying molecular biology and genetics. In 2002, Yapici was a summer Visiting Student in the lab of Mark Gluck at Rutgers University in New Jersey where she studied the cognitive neuroscience of learning and memory. The following summer, she conducted research in Switzerland at the Zurich University Hospital Department of Pathology in the lab of Adriano Aguzzi studying prion diseases. Back at Bogazici University in 2003, Yapici began working in the lab of Kuyas Bugra, where she completed her honors thesis exploring signalling mechanisms in retinal tissue.

After graduating with her B.Sc. in 2004, Yapici pursued her graduate training in Molecular Biology within the Institute of Molecular Pathology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Yapici was mentored by Barry Dickson during her PhD, where she explored the genetic basis of complex innate behavior in Drosophila. Yapici developed a method in the lab to measure Drosophila food intake with high resolution. They found through knockout studies that SRP is critical to the post-mating behavioral change, and without SPR, post-mated females continue to express behavioral phenotypes of virgins. They found that knockdown of these genes lead to similar behavioral phenotypes as flies lacking SRP. Interestingly, MIPs are not derived from male sex organs as SP is, and MIPs are not necessary to promote the switch in behavior post-mating in females, while SP is necessary. They proposed administration of an analogue of SP to females which will bind to SPR and cause the shift in behavior from that of a virgin to that of a post-mated female without the need for copulation. She was able to detect temporally precise ingestion, related to hunger state, and identify 12 cholinergic local interneurons that she called Ingestion Neurons (IN1) necessary for this behavior.

At Cornell, she is one of the four members of the new National Science Foundation funded NeuroNex Hub., developing methods to image the brain in less time, greater depth, and at greater volumes.

Feeding behavior in Drosophila

After starting her lab at Cornell, Yapici started to examine the expression of various Ligand-gated ion channel ionotropic receptors involved in taste function in flies. —another large component is mediated by trhese. Further, through IR56d, carbonation is a behavioral attractant for flies. 2018 Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and American Federation for Aging Research Grants for Early Career Investigators 2017 NSF NeuroNex Neurotechnology Hub Awards 2017 Pew Biomedical Scholar 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 2009 EMBO Long Term Fellowship Bussell, J. J., Yapici, N., Zhang, S. X., Dickson, B. J., & Vosshall, L. B. (2014). Abdominal-B neurons control Drosophila virgin female receptivity. Current Biology, 24, 1584–1595. Kim, Y. J., Bartalska, K., Audsley, N., Yamanaka, N., Yapici, N., Lee, J. Y. & Dickson, B. J. (2010). MIPs are ancestral ligands for the sex peptide receptor. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 107, 6520–6525. Häsemeyer, M., Yapici, N., Heberlein, U., & Dickson, B. J. (2009). Sensory neurons in the Drosophila genital tract regulate female reproductive behavior. Neuron, 61, 511–518. Yapici, N., Kim, Y. J., Ribeiro, C., & Dickson, B. J. (2007). A receptor that mediates the post-mating switch in Drosophila reproductive behavior. Nature, 451, 33–37.