Continuous lateral oscillations as a core mechanism for taxis in Drosophila larvae

Abstract
Article and author information
Metrics

Abstract

Taxis behaviour in Drosophila larva is thought to consist of distinct control mechanisms triggering specific actions. Here we support a simpler hypothesis: that taxis results from direct sensory modulation of continuous lateral oscillations of the anterior body, sparing the need for 'action selection'. Our analysis of larvae motion reveals a rhythmic, continuous lateral oscillation of the anterior body, encompassing all head-sweeps, small or large, without breaking the oscillatory rhythm. Further, we show that an agent-model that embeds this hypothesis reproduces a surprising number of taxis signatures observed in larvae. Also, by coupling the sensory input to a neural oscillator in continuous time, we show that the mechanism is robust and biologically plausible. The mechanism provides a simple architecture for combining information across modalities, and explaining how learnt associations modulate taxis. We discuss the results in the light of larval neural circuitry and make testable predictions.

Article and author information

Author details

Antoine Wystrach

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Konstantinos Lagogiannis

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

For correspondence
klagogia@inf.ed.ac.uk

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9349-801X
Barbara Webb

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-618045)

Antoine Wystrach
Konstantinos Lagogiannis

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.