Towards a physiological exploration of sensorimotor processing in behaving Drosophila
We are interested in understanding the cellular and circuit computations that underlie sensorimotor transformations. The model organism we have chosen, Drosophila melanogaster, has long been a mainstay of molecular, developmental and behavioral research. It offers many experimental advantages, including the ability to genetically label and manipulate the activity of specific sub-populations of neurons. More recently, it has become possible to perform in vivo electrophysiology and two-photon calcium imaging from genetically identified neurons in the fly?s central brain [1, 2]. These advances make this powerful genetic model organism attractive for investigations in systems neuroscience.
In order to explore sensorimotor processing, we think it is essential to simultaneously record both neural activity and behavior. Accordingly, we have developed a setup for optical and electrophysiological recording of neural activity while the fly is walking on an air-supported ball [3, 4]. The ball?s movements are recorded at better than single millisecond resolution using an optical mouse sensor, and this readout is treated as a proxy for the fly?s movements [5]. This preparation allows us to present controlled sensory stimuli (e.g., visual stimuli displayed using an LED arena [6]) during visually guided cell-attached and whole-cell patch clamp recordings and two-photon and wide-field fluorescence calcium imaging. Tracking ball motion with high temporal precision allows us to perform both open- and closed-loop experiments, assess the relevance of particular sensory stimuli for the animal, and correlate brain activity with behavior. We will describe the setup and present results from preliminary experiments using this combination of techniques to explore sensory-driven orienting behavior in the fly.
* J.D. Seelig and E. Chiappe contributed equally to this work
References
1. Wilson, Turner and Laurent (Science, 2004).
2. Jayaraman and Laurent (Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 2007).
3. Gotz and Wenking (J Comp Physiol, 1973).
4. Bohm, Schildberger and Huber (JEB, 1991).
5. Lott, Rosen and Hoy (J Neurosci Meth, 2007).
6. Reiser and Dickinson (J Neurosci Meth, 2008).
Conference:
Computational and systems
neuroscience 2009, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 26 Feb - 3 Mar, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Presentations
Citation:
(2009). Towards a physiological exploration of sensorimotor processing in behaving Drosophila.
Front. Syst. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Computational and systems
neuroscience 2009.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.06.2009.03.130
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Received:
02 Feb 2009;
Published Online:
02 Feb 2009.