Nilay Yapici

During graduate school, Yapici explored the underlying genetic mechanisms of post-mating behavioral responses of female flies to understand, at a fundamental level, how an environmental influence can lead to a change in physiology and behavior. To answer her questions, Yapici and her colleagues developed a high throughout egg laying assay such that they could observe receptivity and egg-laying behavior in virgin versus recently mated females. This allowed them to probe the genetic differences between a receptive female and a post-mated non-receptive female to understand what was leading to this change in mating behavior after copulation. Using an inducible RNAi library technique to genetically screen the female drosophila, they found many genes involved in egg-laying and mating behaviors and the genes that markedly stood out were the gene for Sex Peptide and the gene for Sex Peptide Receptor. Yapici and her colleagues were the first to characterize the Sex Peptide Receptor (SPR), which is a G-coupled protein receptor expressed in the brain and ventral nerve chord as well as the female reproductive tract. They found through knockout studies that SRP is critical to the post-mating behavioral change, and without SPR, post-mated females continue to express behavioral phenotypes of virgins. Two other important genes that came out of their studies were TBh, important in octopamine synthesis, and VMAT, important in octopamine transport. They found that knockdown of these genes lead to similar behavioral phenotypes as flies lacking SRP.  By identifying the receptor critical for modulating female reproductive behaviors, Yapici’s work helped to open possibilities for control of pests by targeting this genetic driver of reproductive behaviors.

In 2016, Yapici was recruited to Cornell University to become the Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and Adelson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. Yapici’s lab studies how behavioral states regulate neural circuitry and drive motvational behaviors using fly models. Yapici is addressing this question using hunger and feeding as a model system to probe how environmental cues prompt decision making and drive motivation signals to eat or not to eat in fruit flies. They use a multitude of advanced technologies to probe neural circuitry, genetics, and behavior in flies.

In 2009, Yapici completed her graduate training and then moved to America to conduct her postdoctoral studies in the lab of Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University in New York City. Her research in the Vosshall lab continued to use drosophila as a model organism, however she began to explore the neural circuits governing feeding behavior. Yapici developed a method in the lab to measure drosophila food intake with high resolution. Yapici completed her postdoctoral work in 2016 before starting her own lab at Cornell University.

After graduating with her B.Sc. in 2004, Yapici pursued her graduate training in Molecular Biology within the Institute of Molecular Pathology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Yapici was mentored by Barry Dickson during her PhD, where she explored the genetic basis of complex innate behavior in drosophila. During this time, Yapici helped to discover the receptor for sex peptide.

Nilay Yapici (born c. 1981) is a Turkish neuroscientist and the Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and Adelson Sesquicentennial Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Yapici studies the neural circuits underlying decision making and feeding behavior in fruit fly models to pave the way towards an understanding of how to target and treat obesity and eating disorders in patients.

Yapici was born in Samsun, Turkey in 1981. She attended Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey to pursue her undergraduate studies in molecular biology and genetics. During her undergraduate degree, Yapici explored various research opportunities both at her institution and abroad. In 2002, Yapici was a summer Visiting Student in the lab of Mark Gluck at Rutgers University in New Jersey where she studied the cognitive neuroscience of learning and memory. The following summer, Yapici again conducted research abroad, this time in Switzerland at the Zurich University Hospital Department of Pathology in the lab of Adriano Aguzzi studying prion diseases. Back at Bogazici University in 2003, Yapici began working in the lab of Kuyas Bugra, where she completed her honors thesis exploring signalling mechanisms in retinal tissue.