Measuring and manipulating neural activity underlying behaviors of freely moving animals

A multitude of organisms navigate their environments using a biased random walk strategy that is surprisingly consistent despite profound differences in the information processing structures that implement these strategies. In animals with brains whose size ranges from 10⁴ to 10⁹ neurons, common circuit motifs can be identified with the same information processing or behavioral tasks. In Drosophila, neurons that are common to both the adult and larval stage control functionally similar behaviors even though the actual physical implementation is different - for instance the larva’s backward peristaltic crawling and the adult fly’s backward walking are evoked by activation of the same neuron in both stages. All of these commonalities give hope that we might identify emergent simplicities reflecting fundamental principles of neural function.

In this talk, I will discuss how the Drosophila larva’s navigational strategy reflects computations made on the activities of individual neurons and how by perturbing these activities we can reveal the structure of these computations. And I will describe a new two photon microscope capable of recording the activities of the neurons controlling behavior in freely behaving larvae.