Applied Math Seminar

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Defying gravity: A neuronal pathway for flight stabilization in Drosophila melanogaster

Speaker: Emily Palmer, Cooper Union

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, April 4, 2025, 2:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

To maintain controlled flight, animals and aerial vehicles alike must execute continuous trimming adjustments to compensate for internal and external perturbations. Engineers solve the problem of flight stabilization through the use of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers. Flying animals likely make use of a similar control strategy, using visual, inertial, and proprioceptive cues to determine and correct for deviations from the desired flight path. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a convenient model organism for studying flight control in animals; in addition to elegantly handling external perturbations such as impending collisions or sudden gusts, Drosophila are robust to remarkably large asymmetries in body morphology—even after having lost half a wing, flies retain the ability to fly straight. This performance is all the more impressive considering the controller responsible (i.e., the fly’s brain) is smaller than a sesame seed. In this talk, I will present findings illuminating the neural implementation of the algorithms we believe govern flight control in Drosophila. Prior work has identified a population of neurons descending from the brain to the body, the DNg02s, that collectively regulate wing stroke amplitude over a large dynamic range and appear to be involved in visually-mediated flight stabilization. Here, we reveal the precise function of these neurons in flight control and their downstream connectivity to flight muscles.