Basil el Jundi, PhD
Group Leader SCIENTIFIC Education
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Research InterestMy research aims at understanding how insects use different cues in their environment to set and mantain a desired heading, and how these cues are intergrated in the brain. I have started my research as a PhD student in the laboratory of Uwe Homberg (University of Marburg, Germany), where I studied the sky-compass network in the desert locust brain anatomically and electrophysiologically. Afterwards, I was a postdoc and research fellow in Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant's labs in the Lund Vision Group (Lund University, Sweden) where I investigated compass orientation in South-African ball-rolling dung beetles through electrophysiological, neuroanatomical, and behavioral experiments. Since 2017, I have started my own research group based on the Emmy Noether program of the German Research Council at the Biocenter (Würzburg, Germany). In my group we are focusing on the migratory behavior of the North American monarch butterfly Danaus plexippus. To understand how these animals use different orientation cues to find their way to their overwintering habitat in Central Mexico, we use a combination of behavioral, anatomical, and electrophysiological approaches.
Curriculum Vitae |
SElected Publications (FolLow Link for full publication list)
- Dacke M, Bell ATA, Foster JJ, Baird EJ, Strube-Bloss MF, Byrne MJ, and el Jundi B. (2019) Multimodal cue integration in the dung beetle compass. PNAS 116:14248-14253.
- Immonen E. -V., Dacke M., Heinze S., and el Jundi, B. (2017) Anatomical organization of the brain of a diurnal and a nocturnal dung beetle, J Comp Neurol 525, 1879-1908.
- el Jundi, B, Foster J. J., Khaldy L., Byrne M. J., Dacke M., and Baird, E. (2016) A Snapshot-Based Mechanism for Celestial Orientation, Curr Biol 26, 1456 - 1462.
- el Jundi, B, Warrant E., Byrne M. J., Khaldy L., Baird E., Smolka J., and Dacke M. (2015) Neural coding underlying the cue preference for celestial orientation, PNAS 112, 11395-11400.
- Homberg, U, Heinze, S, Pfeiffer, K, Kinoshita, M, and el Jundi B. (2011) Central neural coding of sky polarization in insects, Phil Trans R Soc B: Biol Sci 366, 680-687.