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Neuroscience

What females really want

Nature volume 512, pages 138–139 (2014)Cite this article

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The identification of neural subcircuits used by female fruit flies to make a choice about whether to copulate with a potential mate provides a template for understanding how the brain integrates complex information to reach decisions.

For humans, the decision to copulate is an intensely personal one, and we like to believe it is a choice made under free will. However, more than a century of studying other species has made it clear that specific internal states, together with the presence of particular external cues, can alter the probability of copulation in a consistent way across a population, strongly suggesting that there are neural circuits that evaluate relevant, predetermined variables and so bias behaviour. Decision-making circuits are present in all species with a nervous system, and understanding how the brain carries out this type of computation is a major goal of neuroscience. Now, three studies (one published in the journal Current Biology1 and two in Neuron2,3) using different genetic strategies have identified circuit components that control the receptivity of female fruit flies to male courtship, outlining the scope of this complex decision-making process.

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Figure 1: To mate or not to mate.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leslie C. Griffith is in the Department of Biology, Volen Center for Complex Systems and National Center for Behavioural Genomics, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454-9110, USA.,

    Leslie C. Griffith

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  1. Leslie C. Griffith
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Correspondence to Leslie C. Griffith.

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Griffith, L. What females really want. Nature 512, 138–139 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/512138a

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