Research Summary

We use the foraging behavior of the roundworm C. elegans to study how animals temporally coordinate locomotion and feeding behavior. Foraging is of particular interest, as locomotion and feeding are controlled in two entirely distinct neural circuits of the worm. These two sub-networks are only connected by a bilateral pair of gap junctions, forming a bottleneck between the two circuits. Intriguingly, sensory information is transmitted between those two networks: for example, a touch detected by the touch-sensory neurons of the somatic network causes a halt in feeding. How information is transmitted and how it is compressed in this bottleneck is a key question in my group. Bottlenecks are common both in biological networks as well as artificial networks and are often the crucial ingredient for separating relevant information from irrelevant information.

We follow the information flow through the bottleneck experimentally using behavioral assays, neural activity imaging, optogenetics, and genetic perturbations. Ultimately, the goal of the group ‘Neural Information Flow’ is to understand how animals integrate multiple sources of information and how this drives their foraging strategy. We expect that this approach will yield insight on decision making and attention in a small invertebrate brain.