Network Architecture Producing Swing to Stance Transitions in an Insect Walking System

The walking system of the stick insect is one of the most thoroughly described invertebrate systems. We know a lot about the role of sensory input in the control of stepping of a single leg. However, the neuronal organization and connectivity of the central neural networks underlying the rhythmic activation and coordination of leg muscles still remain elusive. It is assumed that these networks can couple in the absence of phasic sensory input due to the observation of spontaneous recurrent patterns (SRPs) of coordinated motor activity equivalent to fictive stepping-phase transitions. Here we sought to quantify the phase of motor activity within SRPs in the isolated and interconnected meso- and meta-thoracic ganglia. We show that SRPs occur not only in the meso-, but also in the metathoracic ganglia of the stick insect, discovering a qualitative difference between them. We construct a network based on neurophysiological data capable of reproducing the measured SRP phases to investigate this difference. By comparing network output to the biological measurements we confirm the plausibility of the architecture and provide a hypothesis to account for these qualitative differences. The neural architecture we present couples individual central pattern generators to reproduce the fictive stepping-phase transitions observed in deafferented stick insect preparations after pharmacological activation, providing insights into the neural architecture underlying coordinated locomotion.