Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China
Wesley Hung
Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada; University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Department of Neurobiology, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, United States
Jing Huo
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China
Tianqi Xu
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Center for Integrative Imaging, School of Life Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Hefei, China; Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China
Complex animal behaviors arise from a flexible combination of stereotyped motor primitives. Here we use the escape responses of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to study how a nervous system dynamically explores the action space. The initiation of the escape responses is predictable: the animal moves away from a potential threat, a mechanical or thermal stimulus. But the motor sequence and the timing that follow are variable. We report that a feedforward excitation between neurons encoding distinct motor states underlies robust motor sequence generation, while mutual inhibition between these neurons controls the flexibility of timing in a motor sequence. Electrical synapses contribute to feedforward coupling whereas glutamatergic synapses contribute to inhibition. We conclude that C. elegans generates robust and flexible motor sequences by combining an excitatory coupling and a winner-take-all operation via mutual inhibition between motor modules.
