The emergence of stereotyped behaviors in C. elegans

Authors

Greg J Stephens, William S Ryu and William Bialek, Princeton University

Abstract

Many organisms, including humans, engage in stereotyped behaviors and these are often attributed to a deterministic command process within the nervous system. Here we use the locomotor dynamics of the nematode C. elegans to suggest an alternative explanation in which stereotyped behavior emerges due to noise within a non-linear dynamical system. In previous work (PLoS Comp Bio 4, e1000028 (2008)) we found that the body shapes of freely-crawling C. elegans are well-captured by four ‘eigenworms’, two of which encode the phase of a locomotory wave that generates forward and backward motion. We also used this representation to infer a non-linear dynamical model for the phase in which forward and backward crawling emerge as attractors of the deterministic dynamics. Here we show that noise induces reversals between forward and backward crawling and that the predicted reversal rate is in good agreement with experiment, with no adjustable parameters. In this model, reversals follow a stereotyped trajectory for the same reason that Brownian escape over a barrier is dominated by a narrowly defined class of trajectories. Stereotypy becomes even clearer in the dynamics with lower noise levels; the real C. elegans is just outside the regime where the reversal rate follows an Arrhenius dependence on the noise level. We discus the implications of our results for C. elegans and other organisms.

Back to APS March Meeting 2010 Focus Session on Physics of Behavior -- From Molecules to Organisms.