Vogelstein, J.T. et al. Science 344, 386–392 (2014).

Identifying the neural circuits behind even a single animal behavior has so far been a slow process. Vogelstein et al. describe a high-throughput approach for mapping multiple larval behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster to defined neurons. The researchers combined automated behavioral tracking with optogenetic activation via channelrhodopsin of 1,054 Drosophila lines having sparse neuronal expression patterns to analyze the behavior of about 38,000 fly larvae. Upon clustering the observed behaviors with a multiscale unsupervised structure-learning method, the researchers observed 29 distinct behaviors. Almost half of the fly lines behaved differently from controls, and in most lines, only one behavior was overrepresented. In conjunction with the morphological characterization available for these lines, the behavioral data provide a reference atlas for studying which neurons mediate which behaviors.