Dataset Information

Characterizing approach behavior of Drosophila melanogaster in Buridan's paradigm.

ABSTRACT: The Buridan's paradigm is a behavioral task designed for testing visuomotor responses or phototaxis in fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In the task, a wing-shortened fruit fly freely moves on a round platform surrounded by a 360° white screen with two vertical black stripes placed at 0° and 180°. A normal fly will tend to approach the stripes one at a time and move back and forth between them. A variety of tasks developed based on the Buridan's paradigm were designed to test other cognitive functions such as visual spatial memory. Although the movement patterns and the behavioral preferences of the flies in the Buridan's or similar tasks have been extensively studies a few decades ago, the protocol and experimental settings are markedly different from what are used today. We revisited the Buridan's paradigm and systematically investigated the approach behavior of fruit flies under different stimulus settings. While early studies revealed an edge-fixation behavior for a wide stripe in the initial visuomotor responses, we did not discover such tendency in the Buridan's paradigm when observing a longer-term behavior up to minutes, a memory-task relevant time scale. Instead, we observed robust negative photoaxis in which the flies approached the central part of the dark stripes of all sizes. In addition, we found that stripes of 20°-30° width yielded the best performance of approach. We further varied the luminance of the stripes and the background screen, and discovered that the performance depended on the luminance ratio between the stripes and the screen. Our study provided useful information for designing and optimizing the Buridan's paradigm and other behavioral tasks that utilize the approach behavior.

SUBMITTER: Han R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7843020 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Characterizing approach behavior of Drosophila melanogaster in Buridan's paradigm.

Han Rui R Wei Tzu-Min TM Tseng Szu-Chiao SC Lo Chung-Chuan CC

PloS one 20210128 1

The Buridan's paradigm is a behavioral task designed for testing visuomotor responses or phototaxis in fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In the task, a wing-shortened fruit fly freely moves on a round platform surrounded by a 360° white screen with two vertical black stripes placed at 0° and 180°. A normal fly will tend to approach the stripes one at a time and move back and forth between them. A variety of tasks developed based on the Buridan's paradigm were designed to test other cognitive fu ...[more]

PMID: 33507934

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Project description:BackgroundAggressive behavior in animals is important for survival and reproduction. Identifying the underlying genes and environmental contexts that affect aggressive behavior is important for understanding the evolutionary forces that maintain variation for aggressive behavior in natural populations, and to develop therapeutic interventions to modulate extreme levels of aggressive behavior in humans. While the role of neurotransmitters and a few other molecules in mediating and modulating levels of aggression is well established, it is likely that many additional genetic pathways remain undiscovered. Drosophila melanogaster has recently been established as an excellent model organism for studying the genetic basis of aggressive behavior. Here, we present the results of a screen of 170 Drosophila P-element insertional mutations for quantitative differences in aggressive behavior from their co-isogenic control line.ResultsWe identified 59 mutations in 57 genes that affect aggressive behavior, none of which had been previously implicated to affect aggression. Thirty-two of these mutants exhibited increased aggression, while 27 lines were less aggressive than the control. Many of the genes affect the development and function of the nervous system, and are thus plausibly relevant to the execution of complex behaviors. Others affect basic cellular and metabolic processes, or are mutations in computationally predicted genes for which aggressive behavior is the first biological annotation. Most of the mutations had pleiotropic effects on other complex traits. We characterized nine of these mutations in greater detail by assessing transcript levels throughout development, morphological changes in the mushroom bodies, and restoration of control levels of aggression in revertant alleles. All of the P-element insertions affected the tagged genes, and had pleiotropic effects on brain morphology.ConclusionThis study reveals that many more genes than previously suspected affect aggressive behavior, and that these genes have widespread pleiotropic effects. Given the conservation of aggressive behavior among different animal species, these are novel candidate genes for future study in other animals, including humans.

Dataset Information

Characterizing approach behavior of Drosophila melanogaster in Buridan's paradigm.

Publications

Characterizing approach behavior of Drosophila melanogaster in Buridan's paradigm.

Similar Datasets

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