Optogenetic dissection of descending behavioral control in Drosophila
- Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
- Emory University, United States
- Princeton University, United States
Abstract
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.
Data availability
Videos including one second before until one second after activation for all flies during all treatments have been uploaded to Dryad (doi:10.5061/dryad.fr89c0c). We slowed down these movies 4X to allow easier examination.
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Data from: Optogenetic dissection of descending behavioral control in DrosophilaAvailable at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Jessica Cande
- Shigehiro Namiki
- Wyatt Korff
- Gwyneth M Card
- David L Stern
National Institutes of Health
- Josh W Shaevitz
- Gordon J Berman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Cande et al.
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.
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Optogenetic dissection of descending behavioral control in Drosophila
eLife 7:e34275.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.34275
Further reading
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The neurons that connect the brain and ventral nerve cord in fruit flies have been mapped in unprecedented detail.
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