Leg-tracking and automated behavioral classification in Drosophila

Neuronal control of locomotor handedness in Drosophila

Handedness in humans - better performance using either the left or right hand - is personally familiar, moderately heritable, and regulated by many genes, including those involved in general body symmetry. But behavioral handedness, i.e. lateralization, is a multifaceted phenomenon. For example, people display clockwise or counter-clockwise biases in their walking behavior that is uncorrelated to their hand dominance, and lateralized behavioral biases have been shown in species as disparate as mice (paw usage), octopi (eye usage), and tortoises (side rolled on during righting). However, the me…

Predictability and hierarchy in Drosophila behavior

Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be understood as a set of nested sub-clusters. Although this type of organization holds potential advantages in terms of motion control and neural circuitry, measurements demonstrating this for an animal's entire behavioral repertoire have been limited in scope and temporal complexity. Here, we use a recently developed unsupervised technique to discover and tr…

Universal features in panarthropod inter-limb coordination during forward walking

Terrestrial animals must often negotiate heterogeneous, varying environments. Accordingly, their locomotive strategies must adapt to a wide range of terrain, as well as to a range of speeds in order to accomplish different behavioral goals. Studies in \textit{Drosophila} have found that inter-leg coordination patterns (ICPs) vary smoothly with walking speed, rather than switching between distinct gaits as in vertebrates (e.g., horses transitioning between trotting and galloping). Such a continuum of stepping patterns implies that separate neural controllers are not necessary for each observed …

黑腹果蝇肢体运动生物力学的肌骨建模仿真

Musculoskeletal simulation of limb movement biomechanics in Drosophila melanogaster

研究构建了首个黑腹果蝇腿部的3D数据驱动肌骨模型，结合高分辨率X射线扫描与Hill型肌肉表征，在OpenSim和MuJoCo中实现行为重演与模仿学习，揭示了肌肉协同作用及关节属性对学习的影响，为运动控制研究提供了关键工具。