Jun Meng, Tosif Ahamed, Bin Yu, Wesley Hung, Sonia Ei Mouridi, Zezhen Wang, Yongning Zhang, Quan Wen, Thomas Boulin, Shangbang Gao, Mei Zhen
Continuity of behaviors requires animals to make smooth transitions between mutually exclusive behavioral states. Neural principles that govern these transitions are not well understood. Caenorhabditis elegans spontaneously switch between two opposite motor states, forward and backward movement, a phenomenon thought to reflect the reciprocal inhibition between interneurons AVB and AVA. Here, we report that spontaneous locomotion and their corresponding motor circuits are not separately controlled. AVA and AVB are neither functionally equivalent nor strictly reciprocally inhibitory...
April 12, 2024: Science Advances