High-resolution analysis of individual Drosophila melanogaster larvae uncovers individual variability in locomotion and its neurogenetic modulation

Neuronally orchestrated muscular movement and locomotion are defining faculties of multicellular animals. Due to its simple brain and genetic accessibility, the larva of the fruit fly allows one to study these processes at tractable levels of complexity. However, although the faculty of locomotion c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Open biology 2023-04, Vol.13 (4), p.220308-220308
Main Authors: Thane, Michael, Paisios, Emmanouil, Stöter, Torsten, Krüger, Anna-Rosa, Gläß, Sebastian, Dahse, Anne-Kristin, Scholz, Nicole, Gerber, Bertram, Lehmann, Dirk J, Schleyer, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Brain - physiology
dopamine
Drosophila
Drosophila melanogaster - genetics
Larva - genetics
Latrophilin
learning
locomotion
Locomotion - genetics
tracking
variability
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Summary:Neuronally orchestrated muscular movement and locomotion are defining faculties of multicellular animals. Due to its simple brain and genetic accessibility, the larva of the fruit fly allows one to study these processes at tractable levels of complexity. However, although the faculty of locomotion clearly pertains to the individual, most studies of locomotion in larvae use measurements aggregated across animals, or animals tested one by one, an extravagance for larger-scale analyses. This prevents grasping the inter- and intra-individual variability in locomotion and its neurogenetic determinants. Here, we present the IMBA (individual maggot behaviour analyser) for analysing the behaviour of individual larvae within groups, reliably resolving individual identity across collisions. We use the IMBA to systematically describe the inter- and intra-individual variability in locomotion of wild-type animals, and how the variability is reduced by associative learning. We then report a novel locomotion phenotype of an adhesion GPCR mutant. We further investigated the modulation of locomotion across repeated activations of dopamine neurons in individual animals, and the transient backward locomotion induced by brief optogenetic activation of the brain-descending 'mooncrawler' neurons. In summary, the IMBA is an easy-to-use toolbox allowing an unprecedentedly rich view of the behaviour and its variability of individual larvae, with utility in multiple biomedical research contexts.
ISSN:2046-2441
2046-2441
DOI:10.1098/rsob.220308