Behavioral decoding of Drosophila locomotion in a circular arena
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Computational Biology
- Keywords
- modeling, locomotor structure, Drosophila melanogaster, animal behavior, rotation behavior, locomotor regularity, gumbel distribution
- Copyright
- © 2017 Qiu 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
- 2017. Behavioral decoding of Drosophila locomotion in a circular arena. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2908v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2908v2
Abstract
Motion detection and position tracking of animal behavior over a period of time produce massive amount of information, but analysis and interpretation of such huge datasets are challenging. Here we describe statistical methods to extract major movement structures of Drosophila locomotion in a circular arena, and examine the effects of pulsed light stimulation on these identified locomotor structures. Drosophila adults performed exploratory behavior when restrained individually in the circular arenas (1.27 cm diameter 0.3 cm depth). Measures of the distance to the center of the arena followed a gumbel distribution with mixed components. Representation learning of distance to center from 177,000 observations (from 63 controls and 55 flies with pulsed light stimulation) revealed three major movement components, indicating three locomotor structures characterized as: side-wall walk, angle walk and cross of the central region. Pulsed flies showed reduced cross of the central region compared with controls. We also showed that counter-clockwise walk and clockwise walk were the two major rotation behaviors with equal time proportion. There was a peak relative turning angle at 25.6o for counter-clockwise walk, and 334.4o for clockwise walk. Regression analysis of relative turning angle as a function of distance to center indicated that as distance to center increased, flies switched turning from directions for perimeter-returning to directions for major rotation. Pulsed flies reduced trajectories that had irregular circle-shape and increased trajectories with regular circle-shape during rotation. Taken together, we present a feasible approach to extract major locomotor structures of Drosophila locomotion in a circular arena, and demonstrate how pulsed light stimulation increased the regularity of locomotor trajectory.
Author Comment
This work describes computational methods for analysis and interpretation of Drosophila locomotion in an experimental setting. We present the good fit of gumbel distribution, a non-gaussian-based model, to the observations. We provide a method to extract locomotor structures based on a single parameter. In addition, we show that an external light stimulation increases the regularity of movement trajectories in adult Drosophila. We applied currently leading statistical techniques, including representation learning, modeling with finite mixture distribution, and nonparametric linear-circular regression. There are previously few studies exploring behavioral structures of animal movement. These are the novel findings in the fields between biology and statistical modeling.