Dimensionality and Dynamics in the Behavior of C. elegans
By Greg J. Stephens, B. Johnson-Kerner, William Bialek, W. Ryu. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2007
550 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Aging, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Physiology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2480e76191fd13846aca27ea70ad26ae9b2c1b35
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Citations in the corpus
- Computational neuroethology: a call to action (2019, background): “For example, Stephens et al., 2008 showed that a worm’s centerline originally requiring 100 points could be well approximated by three numbers.”
- High-Throughput Behavioral Analysis in C. elegans (2011, unknown): “To determine whether the available postural information is useful, we sought to replicate work demonstrating that principal component analysis of the worm skeleton yields two major components, analogous to sine and cosine in circular motion, and that these components cycle as the worm moves 7 .”
- Deep neuroethology of a virtual rodent (2019, methodology): “To describe the whole-body pose, we took the top 15 principal components of the virtual rodent’s joint angles and joint positions to yield two 15 dimensional sets of eigenpostures (Stephens et al., 2008).”