In the insect brain, dopamine-releasing nerve cells are crucial to the formation of both punished and rewarded memories.

Hiromu Tanimoto and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology recently localised and identified the most important types of nerve cells involved in forming positive and negative memories of a fruit fly. All four nerve cell types they discovered use dopamine to communicate with other nerve cells. The dopamine signals released by these cells are received in the mushroom body, a prominent brain structure in insect brains. “It is really surprising that similar dopamine-releasing nerve cells can play such different roles,” says Tanimoto.

Read more: Dopamine – A substance with many messages