Meeting Abstract

S1-1.2  Wednesday, Jan. 4  How Drosophila larvae navigate SAMUEL, Aravi*; GERSHOW, Marc; KANE, Elizabeth; KLEIN, Mason; LUO, Linjiao; AFONSO, Bruno; VONNER, Ashley; Harvard University samuel@physics.harvard.edu

How do Drosophila larvae navigate their environments? Using high-throughput quantitative tracking methods with single-animal resolution, we have uncovered the behavioral strategies of larva navigating a variety of defined environments. By analyzing the trajectories and time-varying postures of individual animals as they explore gradients in their environments, we found remarkable similarities and differences in the navigational strategies that subserve a variety of orientational beahviors including phototaxis, chemotaxis, aerotaxis, and thermotaxis. These results point to the computational framework for understanding how navigational behavior is encoded in the larval nervous system through regulation of a small set of motor patterns.