How much of fly walking is written in the wiring?
Abstract
Connectome models of the fly nerve cord generate walking-like motor rhythms, but oscillation alone does not show that the specific wiring matters. Here we provide, to our knowledge, the first test of which features of motor output depend on the specific wiring. We simulated the leg motor systems of two independent Drosophila connectomes, with synapse counts as fixed weights and glutamatergic synapses treated as inhibitory, and compared each with six families of rewired networks that preserve progressively more of its structure, using pre-registered criteria. We find that rhythm is generic but antagonist coordination is not: many rewired networks were more rhythmic than the real ones, yet the real wiring coordinated antagonistic motor pools more strongly than every rewired network, most of all at the thorax--coxa joint. We trace this specificity to how premotor input is allocated between antagonistic pools. Both connectomes carry Sherrington's reciprocal innervation---neurons that excite one pool inhibit its antagonist---and no rewired network does. Reassigning premotor inputs between the pools abolished coordination even when motor neurons' typical input strength changed little (all pre-registered criteria met in one connectome; same direction in the other). Coordination, not rhythm, therefore reveals whether a connectome model's wiring matters.
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BibTeX
@misc{guan2026much,
title = {{How much of fly walking is written in the wiring?}},
author = {Isabel Guan and Yuntian Zhao and Dingyuan Zhang and Shipeng Lyu and I-Ming Chen},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.38665},
eprint = {2609.38665},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38665},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - How much of fly walking is written in the wiring?
AU - Isabel Guan
AU - Yuntian Zhao
AU - Dingyuan Zhang
AU - Shipeng Lyu
AU - I-Ming Chen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.38665
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38665
AB - Connectome models of the fly nerve cord generate walking-like motor rhythms, but oscillation alone does not show that the specific wiring matters. Here we provide, to our knowledge, the first test of which features of motor output depend on the specific wiring. We simulated the leg motor systems of two independent Drosophila connectomes, with synapse counts as fixed weights and glutamatergic synapses treated as inhibitory, and compared each with six families of rewired networks that preserve progressively more of its structure, using pre-registered criteria. We find that rhythm is generic but antagonist coordination is not: many rewired networks were more rhythmic than the real ones, yet the real wiring coordinated antagonistic motor pools more strongly than every rewired network, most of all at the thorax--coxa joint. We trace this specificity to how premotor input is allocated between antagonistic pools. Both connectomes carry Sherrington's reciprocal innervation---neurons that excite one pool inhibit its antagonist---and no rewired network does. Reassigning premotor inputs between the pools abolished coordination even when motor neurons' typical input strength changed little (all pre-registered criteria met in one connectome; same direction in the other). Coordination, not rhythm, therefore reveals whether a connectome model's wiring matters.
ER -