ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2013
Calcium signalling indicates bilateral power balancing in the Drosophila flight muscle during manoeuvring flight.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Signalling networks orchestrating the development of Drosophila indirect flight muscles.Histochemistry and cell biology · 2026Review
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- FLEX: Flight Exercise Training Protocol for the Fruit Fly Drosophila.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2025Article
- Single-cell type analysis of wing premotor circuits in the ventral nerve cord ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Flight power muscles have a coordinated, causal role in controlling hawkmoth pitch turns.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Article
- An information theoretic method to resolve millisecond-scale spike timing precision in a comprehensive motor program.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Preference and detrimental effects of high fat, sugar, and salt diet in wild-caught Drosophila simulans are reversed by flight exercise.FASEB bioAdvances · 2021Article
- Neural control and precision of flight muscle activation in Drosophila.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2017Review
- The aerodynamics and control of free flight manoeuvres in Drosophila.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Joint torques in a freely walking insect reveal distinct functions of leg joints in propulsion and posture control.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Flexibility and control of thorax deformation during hawkmoth flight.Biology letters · 2016Article
- In vivo time-resolved microtomography reveals the mechanics of the blowfly flight motor.PLoS biology · 2014Article
- Mutations of the Drosophila myosin regulatory light chain affect courtship song and reduce reproductive success.PloS one · 2014Article
- Distinctions among electroconvulsion- and proconvulsant-induced seizure discharges and native motor patterns during flight and grooming: quantitative spike pattern analysis inJournal of neurogeneticsArticle
- Flight and seizure motor patterns in Drosophila mutants: simultaneous acoustic and electrophysiological recordings of wing beats and flight muscle activity.Journal of neurogeneticsArticle
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Manoeuvring flight in animals requires precise adjustments of mechanical power output produced by the flight musculature. In many insects such as fruit flies, power generation is most likely varied by altering stretch-activated tension, that is set by sarcoplasmic calcium levels. The muscles reside in a thoracic shell that simultaneously drives both wings during wing flapping. Using a genetically expressed muscle calcium indicator, we here demonstrate in vivo the ability of this animal to bilaterally adjust its calcium activation to the mechanical power output required to sustain aerodynamic costs during flight. Motoneuron-specific comparisons of calcium activation during lift modulation and yaw turning behaviour suggest slightly higher calcium activation for dorso-longitudinal than for dorsoventral muscle fibres, which corroborates the elevated need for muscle mechanical power during the wings' downstroke. During turning flight, calcium activation explains only up to 54 per cent of the required changes in mechanical power, suggesting substantial power transmission between both sides of the thoracic shell. The bilateral control of muscle calcium runs counter to the hypothesis that the thorax of flies acts as a single, equally proportional source for mechanical power production for both flapping wings. Collectively, power balancing highlights the precision with which insects adjust their flight motor to changing energetic requirements during aerial steering. This potentially enhances flight efficiency and is thus of interest for the development of technical vehicles that employ bioinspired strategies of power delivery to flapping wings.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.