Animals are capable of performing an amazing set of actions. In many species, particularly invertebrates (although scarily also humans), a large percentage of the behavioral repertoire is comprised of stereotyped behaviors—actions that are seen again and again across time and individuals. I will present recent work from my group and our collaborators trying to uncover how these behaviors are actuated and controlled in the wiggling nematode worm C. elegans and the dancing fruit fly D. melanogaster. Through the use of real-time optogenetic readout and control of brain activity, we have made progress on understanding the systems that convert external stimuli into behavioral changes and those that allow animals to dynamically select from a suite of hundreds of unique actions.
Host: Jonathon Howard
Tea after the talk outside SPL 57