Open Access
2009 Finding Behavioral Motifs in Fly Trajectories
Dhruv Grover, Simon Tavare
Commun. Inf. Syst. 9(3): 283-294 (2009).

Abstract

Patterns of locomotor activity of a freely moving organism can help characterize its behavioral phenotypes. To infer behavior from such activity in Drosophila melanogaster, we use a real-time image acquisition system to track the movement of multiple flies in three dimensions. When dealing with fly movement trajectories, we must take into account that similar movement patterns can be expressed in different orientations and speeds. In this paper, we present methods to transform the three-dimensional fly movement trajectories into a space that is translation, rotation, scale and timescale invariant. We then propose an approach motivated by sequence alignment to detect similar movement patterns from fly trajectories in order to infer specific behaviors. We demonstrate the accuracy of the methods and highlight their usefulness in studies aimed at characterizing behavioral phenotypes.

Citation

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Dhruv Grover. Simon Tavare. "Finding Behavioral Motifs in Fly Trajectories." Commun. Inf. Syst. 9 (3) 283 - 294, 2009.

Information

Published: 2009
First available in Project Euclid: 22 January 2010

zbMATH: 1184.92060

Rights: Copyright © 2009 International Press of Boston

Vol.9 • No. 3 • 2009
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