TY - JOUR TI - Optogenetic dissection of descending behavioral control in Drosophila AU - Cande, Jessica AU - Namiki, Shigehiro AU - Qiu, Jirui AU - Korff, Wyatt AU - Card, Gwyneth M AU - Shaevitz, Joshua W AU - Stern, David L AU - Berman, Gordon J A2 - Scott, Kristin VL - 7 PY - 2018 DA - 2018/06/26 SP - e34275 C1 - eLife 2018;7:e34275 DO - 10.7554/eLife.34275 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34275 AB - In most animals, the brain makes behavioral decisions that are transmitted by descending neurons to the nerve cord circuitry that produces behaviors. In insects, only a few descending neurons have been associated with specific behaviors. To explore how descending neurons control an insect’s movements, we developed a novel method to systematically assay the behavioral effects of activating individual neurons on freely behaving terrestrial D. melanogaster. We calculated a two-dimensional representation of the entire behavior space explored by these flies, and we associated descending neurons with specific behaviors by identifying regions of this space that were visited with increased frequency during optogenetic activation. Applying this approach across a large collection of descending neurons, we found that (1) activation of most of the descending neurons drove stereotyped behaviors, (2) in many cases multiple descending neurons activated similar behaviors, and (3) optogenetically activated behaviors were often dependent on the behavioral state prior to activation. KW - optogenetics KW - descending interneurons KW - behavior JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -