@article {48765, title = {Experimental and statistical reevaluation provides no evidence for Drosophila courtship song rhythms.}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America}, volume = {114}, year = {2017}, month = {2017 Aug 29}, pages = {9978-83}, abstract = {

From 1980 to 1992, a series of influential papers reported on the discovery, genetics, and evolution of a periodic cycling of the interval between Drosophila male courtship song pulses. The molecular mechanisms underlying this periodicity were never described. To reinitiate investigation of this phenomenon, we previously performed automated segmentation of songs but failed to detect the proposed rhythm [Arthur BJ, et al. (2013) BMC Biol 11:11; Stern DL (2014) BMC Biol 12:38]. Kyriacou et al. [Kyriacou CP, et al. (2017) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114:1970-1975] report that we failed to detect song rhythms because (i) our flies did not sing enough and (ii) our segmenter did not identify many of the song pulses. Kyriacou et al. manually annotated a subset of our recordings and reported that two strains displayed rhythms with genotype-specific periodicity, in agreement with their original reports. We cannot replicate this finding and show that the manually annotated data, the original automatically segmented data, and a new dataset provide no evidence for either the existence of song rhythms or song periodicity differences between genotypes. Furthermore, we have reexamined our methods and analysis and find that our automated segmentation method was not biased to prevent detection of putative song periodicity. We conclude that there is no evidence for the existence of Drosophila courtship song rhythms.

}, issn = {1091-6490}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.1707471114}, author = {Stern, David L and Clemens, Jan and Coen, Philip and Calhoun, Adam J and Hogenesch, John B and Arthur, Ben J and Murthy, Mala} } @article {47056, title = {Connecting neural codes with behavior in the auditory system of Drosophila.}, journal = {Neuron}, volume = {87}, year = {2015}, month = {2015 Sep 9}, pages = {1332-43}, abstract = {

Brains are optimized for processing ethologically relevant sensory signals. However, few studies have characterized the neural coding mechanisms that underlie the transformation from natural sensory information to behavior. Here, we focus on acoustic communication in Drosophila melanogaster and use computational modeling to link natural courtship song, neuronal codes, and female behavioral responses to song. We show that melanogaster females are sensitive to long timescale song structure (on the order of tens of seconds). From intracellular recordings, we generate models that recapitulate neural responses to acoustic stimuli. We link these neural codes with female behavior by generating model neural responses to natural courtship song. Using a simple decoder, we predict female behavioral responses to the same song stimuli with high accuracy. Our modeling approach reveals how long timescale song features are represented by the Drosophila brain and how neural representations can be decoded to generate behavioral selectivity for acoustic communication signals.

}, issn = {1097-4199}, doi = {10.1016/j.neuron.2015.08.014}, author = {Clemens, Jan and Girardin, Cyrille C and Coen, Philip and Guan, Xiao-Juan and Dickson, Barry J and Murthy, Mala} } @article {6090, title = {Multi-channel acoustic recording and automated analysis of Drosophila courtship songs.}, journal = {BMC Biology}, volume = {11}, year = {2013}, month = {2013 Jan 31}, pages = {11}, abstract = {

Drosophila melanogaster has served as a powerful model system for genetic studies of courtship songs. To accelerate research on the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying courtship song, we have developed a sensitive recording system to simultaneously capture the acoustic signals from 32 separate pairs of courting flies as well as software for automated segmentation of songs.

}, keywords = {Animal, Animal Communication, Animals, Drosophila melanogaster, Genetic Variation, Sexual Behavior, Videotape Recording}, issn = {1741-7007}, doi = {10.1186/1741-7007-11-11}, author = {Arthur, Benjamin J and Sunayama-Morita, Tomoko and Coen, Philip and Murthy, Mala and Stern, David L} }