Automated tracking of animal posture and movement during exploration and sensory orientation behaviors.
The nervous functions of an organism are primarily reflected in the behavior it is capable of. Measuring behavior quantitatively, at high-resolution and in an automated fashion provides valuable information about the underlying neural circuit computation. Accordingly, computer-vision applications for animal tracking are becoming a key complementary toolkit to genetic, molecular and electrophysiological characterization in systems neuroscience.



We present Sensory Orientation Software (SOS) to measure behavior and infer sensory experience correlates. SOS is a simple and versatile system to track body posture and motion of single animals in two-dimensional environments. In the presence of a sensory landscape, tracking the trajectory of the animal's sensors and its postural evolution provides a quantitative framework to study sensorimotor integration. To illustrate the utility of SOS, we examine the orientation behavior of fruit fly larvae in response to odor, temperature and light gradients. We show that SOS is suitable to carry out high-resolution behavioral tracking for a wide range of organisms including flatworms, fishes and mice.



Our work contributes to the growing repertoire of behavioral analysis tools for collecting rich and fine-grained data to draw and test hypothesis about the functioning of the nervous system. By providing open-access to our code and documenting the software design, we aim to encourage the adaptation of SOS by a wide community of non-specialists to their particular model organism and questions of interest.
European Molecular Biology Laboratory/Center for Genomic Regulation Systems Biology Unit, Center for Genomic Regulation & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Alex
A
Gomez-Marin
European Molecular Biology Laboratory/Center for Genomic Regulation Systems Biology Unit, Center for Genomic Regulation & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Nicolas
N
Partoune
Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics & Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Greg J
GJ
Stephens
European Molecular Biology Laboratory/Center for Genomic Regulation Systems Biology Unit, Center for Genomic Regulation & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Matthieu
M
Louis
D000818:Animals; D001331:Automation; D002633:Chemotaxis / Q000528:radiation effects; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology / Q000528:radiation effects; D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D007814:Larva / Q000502:physiology / Q000528:radiation effects; D008027:Light; D051379:Mice; D009068:Movement; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D011187:Posture; D012677:Sensation / Q000502:physiology*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D012984:Software; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis; D013696:Temperature; D014743:Videotape Recording