Dimensionality and Dynamics in the Behavior of C. Elegans

Overview

Journal PLoS Comput Biol

Specialty Biology

Date 2008 Apr 5

PMID 18389066

Citations 231

Authors

Greg J Stephens

Bethany Johnson-Kerner

William Bialek

William S Ryu

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

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.

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