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Significance Many animals exhibit behavioral responses to UV light, including harmful insects. Recently, the explosive spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes has increased motivation to better understand insect UV phototransduction. CRYPTOCHROME (CRY) is a highly conserved nonopsin photoreceptor expressed in a small number of brain circadian and arousal neurons in Drosophila melanogaster that mediates cell-autonomous electrophysiological membrane excitability in response to UV light. CRY signaling modulates multiple fly behaviors evoked by UV light, including acute nighttime arousal responses to light flashes and phototaxis toward low-intensity UV light. Loss of CRY or the redox sensor HYPERKINETIC (HK) leads to the loss of ability to avoid high-intensity UV light; thus, CRY signaling exhibits novel features of behavioral executive choice.

©2015 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. Circadian neural circuits generate near 24-hr physiological rhythms that can be entrained by light to coordinate animal physiology with daily solar cycles. To examine how a circadian circuit reorganizes its activity in response to light, we imaged period (per) clock gene cycling for up to 6 days at single-neuron resolution in whole-brain explant cultures prepared from perluciferase transgenic flies. We compared cultures subjected to a phase-advancing light pulse (LP) to cultures maintained in darkness (DD). In DD, individual neuronal oscillators in all circadian subgroups are initially well synchronized but then show monotonic decrease in oscillator rhythm amplitude and synchrony with time. The small ventral lateral neurons (s-LNvs) and dorsal lateral neurons (LNds) exhibit this decrease at a slower relative rate. In contrast, the LP evokes a rapid loss of oscillator synchrony between and within most circadian neuronal subgroups, followed by gradual phase retuning of whole-circuit oscillator synchrony. The LNds maintain high rhythmic amplitude and synchrony following the LP along with the most rapid coherent phase advance. Immunocytochemical analysis of PER shows that these dynamics in DD and LP are recapitulated in vivo. Anatomically distinct circadian neuronal subgroups vary in their response to the LP, showing differences in the degree and kinetics of their loss, recovery and/or strengthening of synchrony, and rhythmicity. Transient desynchrony appears to be an integral feature of light response of the Drosophila multicellular circadian clock. Individual oscillators in different neuronal subgroups of the circadian circuit show distinct kinetic signatures of light response and phase retuning.