dimensionality and dynamics in the behavior of c. elegans维度和动力学在秀丽隐杆线虫的行为.pdfVIP

Dimensionality and Dynamics in the Behavior of C. elegans 1,2,3 1 1,2 1 Greg J. Stephens *, Bethany Johnson-Kerner , William Bialek , William S. Ryu * 1 Lewis–Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America, 2 Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America, 3 Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America Abstract A major challenge in analyzing animal behavior is to discover some underlying simplicity in complex motor actions. Here, we show that the space of shapes adopted by the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is low dimensional, with just four dimensions accounting for 95% of the shape variance. These dimensions provide a quantitative description of worm behavior, and we partially reconstruct ‘‘equations of motion’’ for the dynamics in this space. These dynamics have multiple attractors, and we find that the worm visits these in a rapid and almost completely deterministic response to weak thermal stimuli. Stimulus-dependent correlations among the different modes suggest that one can generate more reliable behaviors by synchronizing stimuli to the state of the worm in shape space. We confirm this prediction, effectively ‘‘steering’’ the worm in real time. Citation: Stephens GJ, Johnson-Kerner B, Bialek W, Ryu WS (2008) Dimensionality and Dynamics in the Behavior of C. elegans. PLoS Comput Biol 4(4): e1000028. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000028 Editor: Olaf Sporns, Indiana University, United States of America Received December 3, 2007; Accepted February 6, 2008; Published April 25, 2008 Copyright: 2008 Stephens et al. Th