Isoflurane impairs neural communication in the fruit fly brain: An investigation of visually evoked responses and spontaneous neural activity

General anesthetics are indispensable for modern medicine, yet are incompletely understood. Neuroimaging studies in mammals suggest the general anesthetics impair neural communication. Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) has been used for investigating the molecular mechanisms of general anesthetics, but the effects of general anesthetics on neural communication in this animal are unknown. This thesis investigates the effects of the general anesthetic isoflurane on the fruit fly brain. The analysis of evoked and spontaneous neural activity shows that isoflurane indeed impairs neural communication. These findings suggest that general anesthetics may affect the fruit fly and mammalian brain in fundamentally similar ways.