Abstract
The ability of animals to effectively locate and navigate toward food sources is central for survival. Here, using C. elegans nematodes, we reveal the neural mechanism underlying efficient navigation in chemical gradients. This mechanism relies on the activity of two types of chemosensory neurons: one (AWA) coding gradients via stochastic pulsatile dynamics, and the second (AWCON) coding the gradients deterministically in a graded manner. The pulsatile dynamics of the AWA neuron adapts to the magnitude of the gradient derivative, allowing animals to take trajectories better oriented toward the target. The robust response of AWCON to negative derivatives promotes immediate turns, thus alleviating the costs incurred by erroneous turns dictated by the AWA neuron. This mechanism empowers an efficient navigation strategy that outperforms the classical biased-random walk strategy. This general mechanism thus may be applicable to other sensory modalities for efficient gradient-based navigation.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2866 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Dec 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors thank Cori Bargmann for providing strains and reagents. The authors also thank Sagiv Shifman and Ami Citri for valuable comments on the first drafts of this manuscript. Some strains were provided by the CGC, which is funded by NIH Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (P40 OD010440). The project was funded by ERC (336803), ICORE, and ISF (1259/13, 1300/17) to AZ. EI and RR are also supported by the Jerusalem Brain Center.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Author(s).