Eugenia CHIAPPE Active Gaze Control Enables Competitive Pursuit in Drosophila
IBENS Neuroscience Seminar
11h
Le séminaire d’Eugenia CHIAPPE (Champalimaud Research, Lisbon) aura lieu dans la salle Favard, IBENS 46 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris
The ability to move effortlessly through complex environments, interacting with conspecifics, avoiding predators, or simply locating resources, depends on maintaining a stable gaze. During locomotion, gaze stability relies on the coordinated movements of the eyes, head, and body, orchestrated by distributed neural activity within the central nervous system –an orchestration that remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will describe how we have leveraged Drosophila courtship behavior to study gaze control as males swiftly pursue a female. Using a combination of quantitative analysis of behavior, circuit manipulations, and physiology, we found that males actively move their heads to keep females within a critical region of their visual field essential for maintaining pursuit. This active gaze control depends on brain-body circuit loops that coordinate head rotations with body translations, shaping the male’s pursuit strategy and their competitiveness under naturalistic courtship conditions. These findings reveal a critical role for head-body coordination in enabling rapid control of directed walking and provide an opportunity to study how brain-body loops are orchestrated to meet the competing demands of pursuit under biomechanical constrains and unpredictability in the females’ behavior.