CAREER: Dissecting the Fundamental Components of Multi-input Response in Exploration and Navigation

职业：剖析探索和导航中多输入响应的基本组成部分

• 批准号: 2144385
• 负责人: Mason Klein
• 金额: $ 75万
• 依托单位: University of Miami
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-07-01 至 2027-06-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2144385&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Dissecting; Fundamental; Components; Multi

A fundamental task of understanding physical systems is to determine how inputs are received, manipulated inside, and transformed into external outputs. This CAREER award investigates a living organism, the fruit fly larva, in a similar way, with the goal of characterizing how its simple brain and body operate to produce physical movement. Crawling larva traversing controlled environments that include changing temperature, vibration, and/or light level will be tracked with cameras, and their behavioral features determined precisely with computer video analysis. The study will use new methods that seek to predict the animal’s behavior in complex temperature environments, use a laser system to destroy single brain cells and observe the effect on behavior, simulate crawling to compare the larva to physics models, and determine how the larva handles multiple kinds of inputs at once. The results together will provide greater understanding of how living systems process the information in their environments and perform important actions. The research is also paired with education and outreach programs, which includes gathering data from student researchers around the world doing larva projects in physics courses, and an animal behavior art museum installation to reach a broader K-12 and public audience.With the goal of thoroughly understanding sensorimotor transformations in a step-by-step fashion, the experiments are designed to deliver complex stimulus functions to freely crawling Drosophila larvae, ideal animals for behavioral quantification and neuronal interrogation and manipulation. By characterizing the whole-animal response to a single input, temperature, as mathematical, predictive functions that maps input to output, the group will dissect the basic input elements that govern the rules of exploratory and navigational motion, and dissect the essential output elements that determine the overall diffusive and directed movement. Through fs laser ablation the group will selectively eliminate combinations of input circuit elements and observe the effect on behavior. They will also observe the whole-animal response to multiple input types: temperature, visible light, mechanical vibration, and optogenetic light. The work in this project will determine how multiple individual input elements in a stimulus circuit combine with internal parameters to produce behavior. In natural contexts animals must respond to many forms of inputs simultaneously, and a full understanding of living systems requires a comprehensive treatment that examines multiple stimuli, multiple sensory neurons acting in a circuit, and internal states and biases of individuals. Completion of the proposed work will make available to the scientific community a detailed characterization of how information travels through a living system, and how multiple inputs interact with each other to produce behavioral output. Determining how multiple inputs combine and especially how the weight of each input depends on surrounding conditions and history, will have direct bearing on more complex systems. Research will be integrated with an innovative education program that brings animal behavior experiments to physical sciences curriculum, and brings animal motion to an art context.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

理解物理系统的一项基本任务是确定如何接收输入、在内部操纵输入以及将其转化为外部输出。该职业奖以类似的方式研究生物体（果蝇幼虫），目的是描述其简单性。摄像头将跟踪爬行幼虫在受控环境中的运动，包括变化的温度、振动和/或光照水平，并通过计算机视频分析精确确定它们的行为特征。试图预测动物在复杂温度环境中的行为，使用激光系统破坏单个脑细胞并观察对行为的影响，模拟爬行以将幼虫与物理模型进行比较，并确定幼虫如何同时处理多种输入。这些结果将让人们更好地了解生命系统如何在其环境中处理信息并执行重要的行动，该研究还与教育和推广计划相结合，其中包括从世界各地从事物理课程幼虫项目的学生研究人员那里收集数据。以及动物行为艺术博物馆装置覆盖更广泛的 K-12 和公众受众。为了以逐步的方式彻底了解感觉运动转变，这些实验旨在向自由爬行的果蝇幼虫提供复杂的刺激功能，果蝇幼虫是行为量化和神经网络的理想动物。通过将整个动物对单一输入（温度）的反应描述为将输入映射到输出的数学预测函数，该小组将剖析控制探索和操作规则的基本输入元素。导航运动，并剖析决定整体扩散和定向运动的基本输出元件，该小组将有选择地消除输入电路元件的组合并观察对行为的影响，他们还将观察整个动物对多重运动的反应。输入类型：温度、可见光、机械振动和光遗传学光，该项目的工作将确定具有内部参数的刺激电路中的多个单独输入元件如何在自然环境中对多种形式的输入做出反应。同时，并且对生命系统的全面理解需要进行全面的治疗，检查多种刺激、在回路中起作用的多个感觉神经元以及个体的内部状态和偏见。完成拟议的工作将为科学界提供信息如何传播的详细特征。通过生命系统，以及多个输入如何相互作用以产生行为输出，特别是每个输入的权重如何取决于周围条件和历史，将对更复杂的系统产生直接影响。与创新教育计划相结合将动物行为实验引入物理科学课程，并将动物运动引入艺术背景。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。