System level analysis of motor-related neural activities in larval .

The way in which the central nervous system (CNS) governs animal movement is complex and difficult to solve solely by the analyses of muscle movement patterns. We tackle this problem by observing the activity of a large population of neurons in the CNS of larval . We focused on two major behaviors of the larvae - forward and backward locomotion - and analyzed the neuronal activity related to these behaviors during the fictive locomotion that occurs spontaneously in the isolated CNS.