Obaid Siddiqi - Later Work

Later Work

In the early nineteen seventies, Siddiqi began to study the genetic neurobiology of drosophila. He and Seymour Benzer discovered a set of temperature sensitive paralytic mutants that exhibit defects in the electrical activity of nerves and muscles. This discover led to a deeper understanding of the ionic mechanism involves in nerve conduction and synaptic transmission.

In the nineteen eighties, Siddiqi and his students Veronica Rodrigues, Kavita Arora, and R. N. Singh carried out pioneering work on the neurogenetics of taste and smell in Drosophila. They identified and variety of genes that control chemosensory behavior. Some of these genes control sensory transduction, others regulation the formation of the neural network in the fly’s brain. Siddiqi’s work has opened up the prospects of an integrated behavior-genetic and neurobiological approach to the study of sensory perception, learning and memory; it has led to an improved understanding of how olfactory information is encoded in the brain of the fly.