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Authors & Affiliations
Edna Normand,Talmo Pereira,Nivedita Rangarajan,David Deutsch,Megan Wang,Mala Murthy
Abstract
Multisensory integration plays an important role during decision-making in naturalistic settings. Here, we dissect circuit mechanisms underlying multisensory integration in Drosophila melanogaster, focusing on neurons that directly drive and modulate mated female rejection behavior (ovipositor extrusion or OE) during courtship. DNp13 is a descending neuron that is both necessary and sufficient for OE (Wang et al. Current Biology, 2020); pC2l neurons, which are activated by male courtship song (Deutsch et al. Current Biology, 2019), provide direct presynaptic input to DNp13 (Wang et al. Current Biology, 2020). Via connectomic analysis, we mapped putative sites of audiovisual integration onto both DNp13 and pC2l, identifying a previously uncharacterized group of visual projection neurons, called LC31, as important inputs to both cell types. Having uncovered that both pC2l and DNp13 receive auditory and visual inputs, we will investigate how these inputs are combined at both levels of the circuit to drive OE. To facilitate this work, we generated sparse driver lines to target the subset of LC31 neurons that serve as inputs to the OE circuit. We used SLEAP (Pereira et al. bioRxiv, 2020) to track the postures of virgin males and mated females during courtship, including tracking OE, in addition to recording and segmenting all song produced by the male, over a large dataset of behavioral recordings. We find that both song and changes in male position (in particular the subtended angle of the male on the female’s retina) precede OE, and are examining differences in this behavior in females with cell types of the OE circuit silenced. Taken together, this study will ultimately provide insight into how neurons integrate multisensory cues directly from their unisensory inputs, and how they integrate multisensory signals over time, to inform dynamic decision making in ethologically relevant settings.