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Abstract :

Omnipresent circadian clocks from archaea to mammals allow organisms to anticipate and cope with periodic environmental changes, that can be anticipated using an internal genetic oscillator. Drosophila melanogaster paved the discovery of the underlying gene network and the neuronal network that drives daily rhythms in physiology and behavior in every animal – this was recognized with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Drosophila brain contains distinct sets of circadian oscillators responsible for generating the morning and evening bouts of locomotor activity, which give rise to the bimodal rest-activity pattern under laboratory conditions. I will show how this coupled oscillator network reorganizes itself to generate flexibility in the hardwired sleep-wake behavior as it encounters light conditions cycling over diurnal and annual timescales. Our findings implicate peptide neuromodulation as the key to dynamically changing the network configuration to distinct states for adapting the behavioral output of the clock to varying environmental conditions.