Targeted manipulation of neuronal activity in behaving adult flies
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Genetics, Neuroscience
- Keywords
- Behavior, GAL4, optogenetic, thermogenetic, neural circuit, Drosophila melanogaster, neural activation, split GAL4, intersectional strategies, binary expression system
- Copyright
- © 2016 Hampel et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Targeted manipulation of neuronal activity in behaving adult flies. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2354v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2354v2
Abstract
The ability to control the activity of specific neurons in freely behaving animals provides an effective way to probe the contributions of neural circuits to behavior. Wide interest in studying principles of neural circuit function using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has fueled the construction of an extensive transgenic toolkit for performing such neural manipulations. Here we describe approaches for using these tools to manipulate the activity of specific neurons and assess how those manipulations impact the behavior of flies. We also describe methods for examining connectivity among multiple neurons that together form a neural circuit controlling a specific behavior. This work provides a resource for researchers interested in examining how neurons and neural circuits contribute to the rich repertoire of behaviors performed by flies.
Author Comment
In version two, an error in Figure 5b was corrected. The chromosome was incorrectly labeled as two rather than three. An additional author affiliation was also added. Finally, the top margin was dropped on all pages.