Biology subjects

Rouyer, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Rouyer, F..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Mating imperatives drive plasticity of the daily temporal niche via dopamine signaling.

Animals confine their daily activity to distinct diurnal, crepuscular, or nocturnal windows. It remains unclear how hundreds of sympatric species sharing the same temporal niche manage to coexist. To address this, we monitored the daily activity of the twilight-active, species-rich Drosophila genus under naturalistic conditions. Here, we show that intense sociosexual interactions rapidly drive a species-specific reformatting of their canonical crepuscular niche. The dominant sensory modality used for sexual communication predicts niche shift direction: reliance on chemosensation for courtship redirects behavioral activity into the night, while visual reliance shifts it into the day. This temporal plasticity bypasses the circadian clock, instead operating via a conserved dopaminergic pathway that simultaneously inhibits sleep and sustains sexual motivation. Our results reveal how mating imperatives enable conditional colonization of otherwise restricted temporal windows. Ultimately, by driving the divergence of previously overlapping niches, sociosexually induced temporal plasticity provides a powerful mechanism for sympatric coexistence in crowded environments.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Neuropeptide Dynamics Coordinate Layered Plasticity Mechanisms Adapting Drosophila Circadian Behavior to Changing Environment.

The Drosophila brain contains distinct sets of circadian oscillators responsible for generating the morning and evening bouts of locomotor activity, giving rise to a bimodal rest-activity pattern in light-dark cycles. We lack a mechanistic understanding of how environmental changes reshape this daily profile of rest-activity pattern. Here, we uncover a seasonal switch mechanism that remodels the evening bout of activity. Under summer-like conditions, an environment favored by fruit flies in temperate climates, levels of the PDF neuropeptide diminish, triggering a cascade. Lowered PDFR signaling disinhibits GSK3/SGG to advance the evening output. Upon sensing PDF loss, the neural activity weakens in the DN1p-SIFa circuit, responsible for promoting afternoon rest; leading to an earlier appearance of the evening peak. At the same time, the functional connections from DN1p to LNd oscillators strengthen, consequently handing over the evening pacemaker role to the DN1ps. Taken together, our findings elucidate how environment-induced changes in PDFR signaling tip the balanced output of the clock network, aligning daily rhythms with seasonal time. Neuropeptide-driven parallel adjustment of clock circuitry and clock protein functioning likely represents a conserved strategy across animal species, enabling them to adapt their daily behavior to seasonal changes throughout the year.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Enhanced neuroimaging with a calcium sensor in the live adult Drosophila Melanogaster brain using closed-loop adaptive optics light-sheet microscopy

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWWe report on an Adaptive Optics (AO) Light-Sheet Fluorescence Microscope compatible with neuroimaging, based on direct wavefront sensing without the requirement of a guide star. We demonstrate fast AO correction, typically within 500ms, of in-depth aberrations of the live adult Drosophila brain, enabling to double the contrast when imaging with structural or calcium sensors. We quantify the gain in terms of image quality on multiply neuronal structures part of the sleep network in the Drosophila brain, at various depths, and discuss the optimization of key parameters driving AO such as the number of corrected modes and the photon budget. We present a first design of a compact AO add-on that is compatible with integration into most of reported Light-Sheet setups and neuroimaging.

biophysics↗