FIBR: How Do Brains Regulate Simple Motor Actions to Generate Complex Behaviors?

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One of the great challenges facing modern biology is understanding how the brains of animals coordinate simple motor acts into complex behaviors. For example, the act of a fly leaping from a table and landing on the ceiling requires an intricate sequence of leg and wing motion rapidly modified by sensory feedback. How brains, even those as simple as a fly's, flawlessly execute such feats remains unknown. This project will combine advances in genetics and engineering to experimentally control the activity of individual neurons within the brains of animals that are behaving normally, thus allowing scientists to directly observe the behavioral consequences of specific brain circuits. This multidisciplinary research will involve three components. First, researchers will engineer ion channels within individual neurons that can be opened and closed with pulses of light, creating a switch that turns brain cells on and off. Second, they will genetically engineer animals with these controllable neurons. Finally, they will use sophisticated electronic devices, such as virtual reality flight simulators, that measure changes in behavior resulting from the experimental manipulation of specific brain circuits. This will allow the investigative team to map and decipher brain regions responsible for the control of various behaviors. The research will be conducted on fruit flies, an important laboratory organism that is used in a wide range of genetic and medical research and is crucial to studying a wide variety of human diseases including alcoholism, senility and obesity. The work will also be incorporated into efforts to 'reverse engineer' flies and combine information about the brains, bodies and behavior of flies to create autonomous flying robots. An educational training and outreach program will foster the development of students and young scientists broadly skilled in biology, math and engineering and capable of approaching formerly intractable problems that require interdisciplinary approaches. This project is a collaboration led by California Institute of Technology (Michael Dickinson) and University of California-Berkeley (Isacoff).