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🪰 A team of Janelia researchers & collaborators have created a new #openscience resource for studying motor control of wing movements in fruit flies.

🧠 The Reviewed #Preprint presents a library of cell-type-specific genetic driver lines that label wing-related motor and premotor neurons in the ventral nerve cord (VNC) of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The toolkit is systematically validated with compelling anatomical and behavioral evidence and will provide a resource for future studies of Drosophila flight and courtship.

👣 All animals must perform precisely controlled movements enabling them to survive and reproduce. In the fruit fly these motor functions are controlled by the VNC, which receives and processes sensory information and generates the movements required for functions such as walking, flight and courtship.

❓ These different behaviors use the same limited set of motor neurons and muscles, but how the pre-movement VNC circuits generate these distinct context-dependent movements through the same set of neurons is not well understood.

🧬 To address this, the team used state-of-the-art genetic engineering methods to produce a large set of transgenic fly driver lines that could then be used to identify the constituent neurons in the pre-movement VNC circuits. They identified 196 unique dorsal VNC cell types targeted by 195 stabilized fly driver lines in the library. This included different types of neurons in the dorsal region of the VNC that connect to wing muscles or other regions and can now be studied and manipulated experimentally.

🎥This movie shows 3D renderings of light microscopy (LM) volumes and skeletons of matching MANC electron microscopy (EM) data for 44 of the 195 sparse transgenic driver lines. The LM volumes were aligned to the JRC 2018 Unisex VNC template. Credit: Philip Hubbard/HHMI Janelia Research Campus