Claire Marcout
Informations
PERSING – Sensory Perception, Neuron/Glie Interactions
Position
UBE Ph.D. Student
Education
Master’s degree in ethology (Sorbonne Paris Nord)
Activities
Research Themes
My PhD project, supervised by Marco Paoli and Thierry Thomas-Danguin aims to understand how alarm pheromones released by honey bees, influence the way bees perceive and react to odors.
When bees detect these alarm signals, they stop focusing on food and may become aggressive, and may have a harder time learning and remembering smells.
To explore this phenomenon, I will study how bees behave after being exposed to alarm pheromones, by measuring their ability to learn to associate smells with a reward, and how accurately they can remember this association.
Then, I will observe the pheromones' action inside the brain using calcium imaging techniques that reveal activity in the antennal lobe, the brain region primarily responsible for processing smells. This will reveal whether alarm pheromones alter the neuronal representation of different types of odors. If changes in behavior or brain activity are found, I will then test the role of chemical messengers, such as serotonin and dopamine, which can influence aggression, motivation, and feeding.
Combining behavioral, brain imaging, and pharmacological experiments will help explain how pheromones affect odor perception and decision-making in honey bees, thereby improving our understanding of communication in social insects.
Key Words
Honey bee, alarm pheromone, PER, learning, memory, olfaction, calcium imaging
Representative publications
Giurfa M, Marcout C, Hilpert P, Thevenot C, Rugani R (2022). An insect brain organizes numbers on a left-to-right mental number line. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119 (44) https://hal.science/hal-03821926v1
Marcout C, Lapeyre B, Darrouzet E. (2025) Cold vs. CO₂: anaesthetic effects on insect antennal functionality. Bulletin of Entomological Research, pp.1-4. https://hal.science/hal-05242742v1
Marcout, C., Santolin, C., Giurfa, M., & Paoli, M. (2025). Statistical olfactory learning in honey bees. iScience, 28(11), 113662. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113662