I have developed a cutting-edge behavioral assay designed to quantify substrate engagement, capturing a broad spectrum of naturalistic behaviors and compatible with high-throughput, automated analysis. This assay represents a significant advancement in the field in its ability to monitor the precise action of the proboscis and ovipositor, thus revealing the intricate spatiotemporal patterns associated with foraging behaviors, particularly during feeding and egg-laying. In this work I detail the behavioral dynamics of egg-laying in three distinct contexts: a comparative analysis across species, within a two-choice decision-making paradigm, and an examination of its interplay with a competing drive, specifically, starvation-induced feeding.
Tread Light: dissecting spatiotemporal patterns of substrate engagement in Drosophila (publication in preparation)
Unsupervised behavioral classification of freely-moving Drosophila in a 3-D environment
In my 2023 Nature Neuroscience paper, in addition to manual labeling of behavior, I explored multiple automated analyses and successfully implemented two: a supervised classification algorithm that learns from manually-labeled raw video data (DeepEthogram), and a custom implementation of an unsupervised classification pipeline (Motion Mapper) based on a DeepLabCut pose-estimation model. The results of these two extensive analyses bridge the gap between a manual labeling strategy and a fully-automated approach. Importantly, I demonstrate that the unsupervised classifier output displays consistent and dense mapping onto the manually-defined labels.
I devised a novel assay for the monitoring of the activity of abdominal sensory and motor neurons concurrent with egg expulsion. This assay is the first of its kind, affording neural activity measurements of the generally inaccessible abdominal ganglion during naturalistic behavior, thus paving the way for future studies to investigate the role of the nervous system in a host of essential functions, from egg-laying and mating to heart and gut function.