Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly <i>Drosophila</i> from an open field test.
Overview
Abstract
Emotions are based on evolutionarily conserved building blocks (‘emotion primitives’) that are present across mammals. Whether these building blocks are found in insects is largely undefined. Here, we employ the open field test (OFT) in Drosophila and focus on wall-following and total walking activity as behavioural indicators of emotion-like states. Wildtype and transgenic flies were subjected to various conditions prior to behavioural testing. The results indicate that wall-following and total walking activity are independent measures that are modulated, with generally increased wall-following observed under aversive stimuli and decreased values under positive conditions, independent of the time of day. The effects of genetic manipulation of selected neuromodulatory systems support their role in modulating emotion-like states in Drosophila. Activation of reward-related neurons decreased wall-following while inhibition increased it. Moreover, treatment with ethanol or diazepam produced predictable changes in behaviour. Our findings suggest that Drosophila shares conserved core emotion-like building blocks with vertebrates, and show that wall-following and total walking activity in the OFT can serve as a reliable indicator of emotional valence and arousal in the fruit fly. This positions Drosophila as a powerful genetic model to dissect the neuronal and neurochemical substrates of emotion primitives.
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Code
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r-project.org
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supp:PMC13727074/elife-107110-code1.zip
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supp:PMC13727074/elife-107110-code2.zip
Availability: 1 check, the latest on 3 November 2026: the link answers (HTTP 200)
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Materials availability statement
All fly lines are available upon request to the corresponding authors. The MatLab code for the OFT is present in the Supplementary Materials (Source code 1 and 2).
Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.
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Data
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Data availability
Source data 1 contains all numerical data used to generate the figures.
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Version 1, 3 November 2026: the first record
Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, pages, dates, 5 authors, 7 keywords, 10 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 104 references, 3 RRIDs.
Cite
This paper
Lueningschroer-Wang, Y., Derksen, E., Wilde, H., Steigmeier, M., & Wegener, C. (2026). Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly &
BibTeX
@article{lueningschroerw
author = {Lueningschroer-Wang, Yi and Derksen, Emilia and Wilde, Hannah and Steigmeier, Maria and Wegener, Christian},
title = {{Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly \&
journal = {eLife},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
volume = {14},
pages = {RP107110},
publisher = {eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd},
issn = {2050-084X},
doi = {10.7554/
url = {https://
pmid = {42969452},
pmcid = {PMC13727074}
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
AU - Lueningschroer-Wang, Yi
AU - Derksen, Emilia
AU - Wilde, Hannah
AU - Steigmeier, Maria
AU - Wegener, Christian
TI - Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly &
T2 - eLife
J2 - eLife
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/
VL - 14
SP - RP107110
SN - 2050-084X
PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
DO - 10.7554/
UR - https://
LA - en
ER -
CSL-JSON
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