Statistical and Interdisciplinary Physics Group, Centro Atómico Bariloche, Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina.
Medical Physics Department, CONICET and Centro Atómico Bariloche, Av. E. Bustillo 9500, (8400) San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina.
PLoS One. 2018 Aug 23;13(8):e0202505. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0202505. eCollection 2018.
In many animals the circadian rhythm of locomotor activity is controlled by an endogenous circadian clock. Using custom made housing and video tracking software in order to obtain high spatial and temporal resolution, we studied the statistical properties of the locomotor activity of wild type and two clock mutants of Drosophila melanogaster. We show here that the distributions of activity and quiescence bouts for the clock mutants in light-dark conditions (LD) are very different from the distributions obtained when there are no external cues from the environment (DD). In the wild type these distributions are very similar, showing that the clock controls this aspect of behavior in both regimes (LD and DD). Furthermore, the distributions are very similar to those reported for Wistar rats. For the timing of events we also observe important differences, quantified by how the event rate distributions scale for increasing time windows. We find that for the wild type these distributions can be rescaled by the same function in DD as in LD. Interestingly, the same function has been shown to rescale the rate distributions in Wistar rats. On the other hand, for the clock mutants it is not possible to rescale the rate distributions, which might indicate that the extent of circadian control depends on the statistical properties of activity and quiescence.
在许多动物中，运动活动的昼夜节律受内源性生物钟控制。使用定制的外壳和视频跟踪软件，以获得高空间和时间分辨率，我们研究了黑腹果蝇的野生型和两种生物钟突变体在光暗条件（LD）下的运动活动的统计特性。我们在这里表明，在没有环境外部线索的情况下（DD），生物钟突变体在光暗条件下（LD）的活动和静止爆发的分布与在没有外部线索的情况下（DD）获得的分布非常不同。在野生型中，这些分布非常相似，表明生物钟在这两种情况下（LD 和 DD）控制着这种行为。此外，这些分布与报告的 Wistar 大鼠的分布非常相似。对于事件的时间，我们也观察到了重要的差异，这是通过增加时间窗口时事件率分布的缩放程度来量化的。我们发现，对于野生型，DD 中的相同函数可以对这些分布进行缩放，就像在 LD 中一样。有趣的是，已经表明相同的函数可以对 Wistar 大鼠的速率分布进行缩放。另一方面，对于生物钟突变体，不可能对速率分布进行缩放，这可能表明昼夜节律控制的程度取决于活动和静止的统计特性。
