Data from: Optogenetic dissection of descending behavioral control in Drosophila

In most animals, the brain makes behavioral decisions that are transmitted
by descending neurons to the nerve cord circuitry that produces behaviors.
In insects, only a few descending neurons have been associated with
specific behaviors. To explore how descending neurons control an
insect's movements, we developed a novel method to systematically
assay the behavioral effects of activating individual neurons on freely
behaving terrestrial D. melanogaster. We calculated a two-dimensional
representation of the entire behavior space explored by these flies and we
associated descending neurons with specific behaviors by identifying
regions of this space that were visited with increased frequency during
optogenetic activation. Applying this approach across a large collection
of descending neurons, we found that (1) activation of most of the
descending neurons drove stereotyped behaviors, (2) in many cases multiple
descending neurons activated similar behaviors, and (3)
optogenetically-activated behaviors were often dependent on the behavioral
state prior to activation.