From behavior to circuit modeling of light-seeking navigation in zebrafish larvae
- Laboratoire Jean Perrin, France
- Laboratoire de Physique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, France
Abstract
Bridging brain-scale circuit dynamics and organism-scale behavior is a central challenge in neuroscience. It requires the concurrent development of minimal behavioral and neural circuit models that can quantitatively capture basic sensorimotor operations. Here we focus on light-seeking navigation in zebrafish larvae. Using a virtual reality assay, we first characterize how motor and visual stimulation sequences govern the selection of discrete swim-bout events that subserve the fish navigation in the presence of a distant light source. These mechanisms are combined into a comprehensive Markov-chain model of navigation that quantitatively predict the stationary distribution of the fish's body orientation under any given illumination profile. We then map this behavioral description onto a neuronal model of the ARTR, a small neural circuit involved in the orientation-selection of swim bouts. We demonstrate that this visually-biased decision-making circuit can similarly capture the statistics of both spontaneous and contrast-driven navigation.
Data availability
Data and analysis codes are available at Dryad Digital: Data DOI: doi:10.5061/dryad.v9s4mw6qx
-
From behavior to circuit modeling of light-seeking navigation in Zebrafish larvaeDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.v9s4mw6qx.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Human Frontier Science Program (RGP0060/2017)
- Georges Debrégeas
H2020 European Research Council (71598)
- Volker Bormuth
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-16-CE16-0017)
- Raphaël Candelier
- Georges Debrégeas
Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FDT201904008219)
- Sophia Karpenko
ATIP-Avenir program
- Volker Bormuth
Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (SPF201809007064)
- Sebastien Wolf
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experiments were approved by Le Comité d'Éthique pour l'Expérimentation Animale Charles Darwin C2EA-05 (02601.01).
Copyright
© 2020, Karpenko 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.
Metrics
-
- 3,141
- views
-
- 438
- downloads
-
- 20
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
From behavior to circuit modeling of light-seeking navigation in zebrafish larvae
eLife 9:e52882.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52882
Further reading
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Ecology
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is becoming an increasingly important tool in diverse scientific fields from ecological biomonitoring to wastewater surveillance of viruses. The fundamental challenge in eDNA analyses has been the bioinformatical assignment of reads to taxonomic groups. It has long been known that full probabilistic methods for phylogenetic assignment are preferable, but unfortunately, such methods are computationally intensive and are typically inapplicable to modern next-generation sequencing data. We present a fast approximate likelihood method for phylogenetic assignment of DNA sequences. Applying the new method to several mock communities and simulated datasets, we show that it identifies more reads at both high and low taxonomic levels more accurately than other leading methods. The advantage of the method is particularly apparent in the presence of polymorphisms and/or sequencing errors and when the true species is not represented in the reference database.
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Neuroscience
We determined the intersubject association between the rhythmic entrainment abilities of human subjects during a synchronization-continuation tapping task (SCT) and the macro- and microstructural properties of their superficial (SWM) and deep (DWM) white matter. Diffusion-weighted images were obtained from 32 subjects who performed the SCT with auditory or visual metronomes and five tempos ranging from 550 to 950 ms. We developed a method to determine the density of short-range fibers that run underneath the cortical mantle, interconnecting nearby cortical regions (U-fibers). Notably, individual differences in the density of U-fibers in the right audiomotor system were correlated with the degree of phase accuracy between the stimuli and taps across subjects. These correlations were specific to the synchronization epoch with auditory metronomes and tempos around 1.5 Hz. In addition, a significant association was found between phase accuracy and the density and bundle diameter of the corpus callosum, forming an interval-selective map where short and long intervals were behaviorally correlated with the anterior and posterior portions of the corpus callosum. These findings suggest that the structural properties of the SWM and DWM in the audiomotor system support the tapping synchronization abilities of subjects, as cortical U-fiber density is linked to the preferred tapping tempo and the bundle properties of the corpus callosum define an interval-selective topography.
