Biology subjects

Couzin-Fuchs, E.

Publications and source records attributed to Couzin-Fuchs, E..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Integrating Electrical Components into a Printed Self-folding Cuff Electrode for Chronic Peripheral Nerve Interfaces

Neuroelectronic thin-film implants hold promise for advancing fundamental understanding of the peripheral nervous system and offer potential for targeted treatments using specific stimulation. However, challenges in establishing robust and durable connections to soft and flexible implants limit their widespread adoption and long-term utility. Here, we present a novel method for integrating rigid electrical components, such as a standard USB-C connector, directly into a printed stretchable self-folding cuff electrode for chronic peripheral nerve interfacing. Our multi-material printing approach provides a gradual stiffness transition, effectively mitigating common failure points associated with mechanical stress at soft-rigid boundary. We demonstrate the integration of a wireless stimulation circuit and a robust USB-C implantable port, offering a plug- and-play solution for stable chronic electrophysiology experiments. Chronic implant studies in free-running locusts with USB-C connectors show reliable nerve recordings, capturing behavioral differences. The concept is further validated as a transcutaneous implanted port in rats for vagus nerve recordings. This work addresses a critical bottleneck in neurotechnology by enabling robust connectivity for implanted devices, which is essential for advancing peripheral nervous electrophysiology experiments in freely moving small vertebrates and insects.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Habitat structure and social behavior - the development of social phenotypes in the desert locust

Habitat structure has fundamental implications for behavior, foraging dynamics, and the social organization of animals. Locusts, which exhibit both a sedentary solitarious morph and a gregarious swarm-forming one, provide a powerful model to investigate how environmental factors shape social phenotypes. We conducted long-term continuous monitoring of locusts raised in semi-natural arenas with either clumped or distributed resources. Our findings reveal that clumped overnight roosting led to an increased propensity for coordinated marching the following day, a key precursor of swarm formation. These patterns became clearer during larval development, driving divergence in social affinity and group dynamics between habitat groups. At the molecular level, transcriptomic analysis identified a narrow set of differentially expressed genes, with enrichment in neuromodulatory and metabolic pathways, including candidates linked to monoaminergic signaling and juvenile hormone biology, such as a takeout-like JH-binding gene. These results demonstrate that spatial resource configuration is sufficient for lasting differences in individual and group dynamics and offer insight into the molecular processes mediating spontaneous, habitat-driven, phenotypic changes in a devastating plague insect.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Synergistic olfactory processing for social plasticity in desert locusts

1Desert locust plagues threaten the food security of millions. Central to their formation is crowding-induced social plasticity from solitarious to gregarious phenotypes. We investigated the impact of population density changes on locusts foraging choices and their neurobiology by examining how relevant food and social odors are coded in the antennal lobe. Our analysis shows that gregarious locusts are highly attentive to social cues during foraging, with olfaction playing an essential role. Using calcium imaging, we show that corresponding odors are encoded by projection neurons, revealing a stable combinatorial response map. Transient dynamics in the glomeruli converge into temporally evolving response motifs in the somata that differ between gregarious and solitarious insects. The dynamics of response motifs facilitate a crowding-dependent synergy between olfactory processing of food-related and social odors. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of calcium imaging for locust olfaction, suggesting a crowding-induced adaptation to enhance food detection in swarms. 2 TeaserIn dense swarms, desert locusts optimize foraging efficiency by exhibiting an enhanced olfactory response to food odors.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Active smelling in the American cockroach

2Motion plays an essential role in sensory acquisition. From changing the position in which information can be acquired to fine scale probing and active sensing, animals actively control the way they interact with the environment. In olfaction, movement impacts the time and location of odour sampling as well as the flow of odour molecules around the olfactory organs. Employing a high-resolution analysis, we investigate how the insect antennae interact with the olfactory environment in a species with a well studied olfactory system - the American cockroach. Cockroaches were tested in a wind-tunnel setup during the presentation of odours with different attractivity levels: colony extract, butanol and linalool. Our analysis revealed significant changes in antennal kinematics when odours are presented, including a shift towards the stream position, an increase in vertical movement and high-frequency local oscillations. Nevertheless, the antennal shifting occurred predominantly in a single antenna while the overall range covered by both antennae was maintained throughout. These findings hold true for both static and moving stimuli and are more pronounced for attractive odours. Furthermore, we find that upon odour encounter, there is an increased occurrence of high-frequency antennal sweeps and vertical strokes, which are shown to impact the olfactory environments statistics directly. Our study lays out a tractable system for exploring the tight coupling between sensing and movement, in which antennal sweeps, in parallel to mammalian sniffing, are actively involved in facilitating odour capture and transport, generating odour intermittency in environments with low air movement where cockroaches dwell.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2022

Information integration for nutritional decision-making in desert locusts

1Swarms of the migratory desert locust can extend over several hundred square kilometres, and starvation compels this ancient pest to devour everything in its path. Theory suggests that gregarious behaviour benefits foraging efficiency over a wide range of spatial food distributions. However, despite the importance of identifying the processes by which swarms locate and select feeding sites to predict their progression, the role of social cohesion during foraging remains elusive. We investigated the evidence accumulation and information integration processes that underlie locusts nutritional decision-making by employing a Bayesian formalism on high-resolution tracking data from foraging locusts. We tested individual gregarious animals and groups of different sizes in a 2-choice behavioural assay in which food patch qualities were either different or similar. We then predicted the decisions of individual locusts based on personally acquired and socially derived evidence by disentangling the relative contributions of each information class. Our study suggests that locusts balance incongruent evidence but reinforce congruent ones, resulting in more confident assessments when evidence aligns. We provide new insights into the interplay between personal experience and social context in locust foraging decisions which constitute a powerful empirical system to study local individual decisions and their consequent collective dynamics.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

Coding of odour and space in the hemimetabolous insect Periplaneta americana

The general architecture of the olfactory system is highly conserved from insects to humans, but neuroanatomical and physiological differences can be observed across species. The American cockroach, inhabiting dark shelters with a rather stable olfactory landscape, is equipped with long antennae used for sampling the surrounding air-space for orientation and navigation. The antennaes exceptional length provides a wide spatial working range for odour detection; however, it is still largely unknown whether and how this is also used for mapping the structure of the olfactory environment. By selective labelling antennal lobe projection neurons with a calcium sensitive dye, we investigated the logic of olfactory coding in this hemimetabolous insect. We show that odour responses are stimulus-specific and concentration-dependent, and that structurally related odorants evoke physiologically similar responses. By using spatially confined stimuli, we show that proximal stimulations induce stronger and faster responses than distal ones. Spatially confined stimuli of the female pheromone periplanone-B activate sub-region of the male macroglomerulus. Thus, we report that the combinatorial logic of odour coding deduced from holometabolous insects applies also to this hemimetabolous species. Furthermore, a fast decrease in sensitivity along the antenna, not supported by a proportionate decrease in sensillar density, suggests a neural architecture that strongly emphasizes neuronal inputs from the proximal portion of the antenna. Summary statementBy selective labelling the cockroachs antennal lobe output neurons, we investigated the logic of olfactory coding in a hemimetabolous insect, showing that odour responses are stimulus-specific, concentration-dependent, and preserve information on the spatial structure of the stimulus.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

The subesophageal ganglion modulates locust inter-leg sensory-motor interactions via contralateral pathways

The neural control of insect locomotion is distributed among various body segments. Local pattern-generating circuits at the thoracic ganglia interact with incoming sensory signals and central descending commands from the head ganglia. The evidence from different insect preparations suggests that the subesophageal ganglion (SEG) may play an important role in locomotion-related tasks. In a previous study, we demonstrated that the locust SEG modulates the coupling pattern between segmental leg CPGs in the absence of sensory feedback. Here, we investigated its role in processing and transmitting sensory information to the leg motor centers, and mapped the major related neural pathways. Specifically, the intra- and inter-segmental transfer of leg-feedback were studied by simultaneously monitoring motor responses and descending signals from the SEG. Our findings reveal a crucial role of the SEG in the transfer of intersegmental, but not intrasegmental, signals. Additional lesion experiments, in which the intersegmental connectives were cut at different locations, together with double nerve staining, indicated that sensory signals are mainly transferred to the SEG via the connective contralateral to the stimulated leg. We therefore suggest that, similar to data reported for vertebrates, insect leg sensory-motor loops comprise contralateral ascending pathways to the head and ipsilateral descending ones.

neuroscience↗