The Flexible Mind of a Worm: the atlas of brain-wide representations of behavior in C. elegans

Abstract

The primary function of the brain is to generate behaviors and motor outputs. However, how neurons across the brain encode quantitative features of an animal’s behavior remains largely unknown. In this work, we built a new system to record and extract brain-wide activity in freely-behaving C. elegans. We built non-linear probabilistic models to explain how individual neurons encode distinct behavioral features. Utilizing neuronal identity information of the recorded neurons, we created the first-ever atlas describing how each defined neuron class in an animal’s brain encodes its behavior. Furthermore, we examined how these encodings change over varying behavioral states and identified key nodes in the connectome that could flexibly change encoding. Overall, this work provides a new view of how neurons across the brain of an animal encode its behavior.