“Drosophila [fruit fly] courtship is a complex behavior. A new study shows that glia modulate neurotransmission to influence male preference, but the authors should have resisted the temptation to describe their results in tabloid language.” Joel Levine of the University of Toronto, begins his Commentary “Glia and romance” (Nature Neuroscience 11, 8 – 10; 2008) with this provocative statement. He goes on to write: “The study by Grosjean et al. ”https://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n1/full/nn2019.html">[Nature Neuroscience 11, 54–61; 2008] makes an important contribution by calling attention to a neuro-glial element in the circuitry that governs courtship behavior. Furthermore, this study initiates the search for the glutamatergic neurons involved in the processing of courtship pheromones. Apart from its merits, however, this paper has a serious language problem. Throughout, the authors use the term homosexual to describe the behavior of a male mutant that courts both males and females with equal probability." Levine goes on to explain why the use of the term homosexuality to define the flies’ behaviour is inappropriate and objectionable.

In a Nature Network journal club discussion of this paper, Nature Neuroscience editor Noah Gray describes the authors’ controversial nomenclature, and provides links to some discussion on blogs at the New York Times. Putting this issue aside, questions for the journal club include:

—How could changing the glutamate content in the extracellular space contribute to the altered processing by the appropriate (but unknown) circuits?

—How do these Drosophila courtship behaviours relate to mammalian courtship rituals and what does the current research say about those behaviours?

Via Action Potential, Noah writes the neuroscience online journal club will feature interesting papers from any journal for discussion, in posts written by students and postdocs discussing somebody else’s work, in the classic spirit of a journal club.

“This forum is designed to teach the non-specialist about certain neuroscience sub-fields in which they may have some interest, as well as to feature important findings that very well may pertain to the current work of the specialist. Hopefully, the discussion will include the following (and more): questions being asked regarding the data or conclusions of the study; inquiries made as to how to successfully implement particular methodologies; reasons given for why additional data would help the authors solidify their conclusions; suggestions floated as to what the next steps should be in the follow-up experiments.”

Another journal club discussion is entitled Extrasensory perception (ESP) fails the test : the Nature Network neuroscience group is clearly setting out to be a lively forum. If you are a neuroscientist, or work in a related discipline, please feel free to join the group and contribute to the discussion.