# Sensory control of a motor sequence

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA · 2022 · $81,633

## Abstract

Abstract
Animals collect sensory information from their environment and use it to select among the many
behaviors they can perform. The exact neural circuits that enable them to detect, compare, and
combine sensory stimuli across space and time to organize motor sequences remain unknown.
Grooming behavior in Drosophila is a sensory-driven motor sequence. We propose to use
optogenetic tools and behavioral analysis to identify the sensory neurons and circuits relevant
for initiation and progression of the fly grooming sequence. Grooming is innate – the basic
capacity to groom is inborn, relying on genetically-specified neural connections, and therefore
accessible to dissection by genetic screens. But the sequence of the actions that constitute
grooming is flexible: there is a high probability that head sweeps and front leg rubs will occur
early and that back leg subroutines to clean the posterior body parts will happen later, but the
exact order of these movements is not fixed. Flies use updating sensory cues to modify the
trajectory of leg sweeps, the duration of cleaning bouts, and the order of movements to remove
different distributions of debris effectively.
A deep mechanistic understanding of how the nervous system organizes reliable but adaptive
motor sequences will address the larger questions of how animals make use of a flood of
sensory data, how they balance the need to exercise a movement precisely with the need to
modify it based on context, and how a limited number of neurons produce the diverse array of
animal behaviors. Neural circuit motifs form the basic computational units of all nervous
systems. Defining the circuits that accomplish sensory comparisons that control a motor
sequence in a simpler system such as fly grooming will provide a template for understanding
how similar functions are achieved in all brains.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10683031
- **Project number:** 3R01NS110866-04S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA
- **Principal Investigator:** JULIE H SIMPSON
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $81,633
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2019-05-01 → 2024-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10683031

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10683031, Sensory control of a motor sequence (3R01NS110866-04S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10683031. Licensed CC0.

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