Laura Joan Hermans
Understanding how neural circuits remodel and adapt to animal behavior is a central theme in the field of Neuroscience. One strategy to reach this goal is to repeatedly record the same animal's neural circuits and observe how they adapt when facing different challenges. Research has primarily focused on identifying neural circuits and connectivity maps within the brains of model organisms. Nevertheless, it has become evident that functional recordings are essential to have a complete understanding of how neural circuits generate behaviors. Numerous techniques have been introduced to record activity from brain circuits in model animals spanning from monkeys to insects. However, imaging the spinal cord in mammals or the ventral nerve cord in insects remains an open challenge due to the complexity of obtaining optical access without impacting the animal's behavior and damaging neural tissues. As a result, we have very limited information on how neural circuits in the spinal cord generate behaviors and how they adapt to different experiences such as injury or aging. Drosophila is a perfect model organism for carrying out this line of research thanks to its small size, genetically tractable nervous system, and behavioral diversity. The results are relevant to human physiology and behavior as many mechanisms have homologs in mammals. What is missing is a technological advancement that allows recording of behavior, structural changes in the circuits, and spatiotemporal dynamics of neural activity on the same animal.This thesis addresses this gap and introduces two novel methods for in vivo functional recordings of the fly's ventral nerve cord (VNC). The first one gains short-term access to the fly's VNC using a novel dissection preparation. The second one enables long-term functional recordings of the fly's VNC thanks to a toolkit combining four microengineered devices: a surgical arm, a V-shape implant, an optically transparent and numbered window and a remounting stage. The toolkit is suitable for both male and female flies and provides optical access to the VNC for at least one month. Additionally, the long-term toolkit does not impact flies' behaviors compared to intact flies and can be used to image both sparse and large populations of neural activity in flies' cervical connective and VNC. The toolkit was tested in two proof-of-concept (POC) applications. In the first POC, the toolkit monitored the degradation of sensory neurons in the VNC over weeks following limb amputation. In the second POC, the toolkit monitored global changes in neural dynamics following ingestion of a high-concentration caffeine solution. In conclusion, this thesis introduces new techniques for functional recordings of the fly's cervical connective and VNC over short and long time scales. They enable optical access to the fly's cervical connective that can be leveraged to study the content of information transmitted between the brain and the VNC while the fly is behaving. The two POCs demonstrate that the novel technology is ideally suited for long-term experiments and could be applied to a wide range of studies. For instance, the toolkit could be used to investigate how behaviors are encoded in the fly's VNC and how they adapt over time to experiences such as disease, aging, drug intake and learning.
EPFL2022
