The emergence of stereotyped behaviors in C. elegans

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event The emergence of stereotyped behaviors in C. elegans Greg Stephens1, 2*, William Ryu3 and William Bialek4 1 Lewis-Sigler Institute , United States 2 Princeton University, Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics , United States 3 University of Toronto, Canada 4 Princeton University, United States Many organisms, including humans, engage in stereotyped behaviors and these are often attributed to a deterministic command process within the nervous system. Here we use the locomotor dynamics of the nematode C. elegans to suggest an alternative explanation in which stereotyped behavior emerges due to noise within a non-linear dynamical system. In previous work (PLoS Comp Bio 4, e1000028 (2008)) we found that the body shapes of freely-crawling C. elegans are well-captured by four ‘eigenworms’, two of which encode the phase of a locomotory wave that generates forward and backward motion. We also used this representation to infer a non-linear dynamical model for the phase in which forward and backward crawling emerge as attractors of the deterministic dynamics. Here we show that noise induces reversals between forward and backward crawling and that the predicted reversal rate is in good agreement with experiment, with no adjustable parameters. In this model, reversals follow a stereotyped trajectory for the same reason that Brownian escape over a barrier is dominated by a narrowly defined class of trajectories. Stereotypy becomes even clearer in the dynamics with lower noise levels; the real C. elegans is just outside the regime where the reversal rate follows an Arrhenius dependence on the noise level. We discus the implications of our results for C. elegans and other organisms. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session II Citation: Stephens G, Ryu W and Bialek W (2010). The emergence of stereotyped behaviors in C. elegans. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00250 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 05 Mar 2010; Published Online: 05 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Greg Stephens, Lewis-Sigler Institute, Princeton, United States, gstephen@princeton.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Greg Stephens William Ryu William Bialek Google Greg Stephens William Ryu William Bialek Google Scholar Greg Stephens William Ryu William Bialek PubMed Greg Stephens William Ryu William Bialek Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.