Thanks so much! Also any comments and feedback would be wonderful and much appreciated - feel free to reach out!

the broader Drosophila and neuroscience fields for all of the amazing previous work that allowed this to be possible!

To search across the wonderful new #malecns on your own, check out male-cns.janelia.org

Major thanks goes to our co-authors, Claire Managan, Marisa Dreher, Elizabeth Kim, Scott Miller, Katie Boone, Alice Robie, Adam Taylor, and @kristinmbranson.bsky.social, the #malecns team, as well as our amazing colleagues @hhmijanelia.bsky.social (in other labs and teams) for their support and… 10/

Across species, behavioral variability is often observed across sexes. These findings and genetic tools provide an unprecedented and experimentally tractable venue for investigating this remarkable axis of variation. 9/

that P1/pC1x and aIPg cell types play a wide-spread role in co-regulating numerous sensorimotor pathways implicated in male social behaviors. 8/

In females, we described three circuit mechanisms by which aIPg neurons co-regulate visual pathways, causing the fly to attend to nearby conspecifics.

We were surprised to discover in males that both aIPg and P1/pC1x neurons act in all three mechanisms (as opposed to one in females), and... 7/

We also generated 32 new split-GAL4 driver lines targeting single or subsets of P1/pC1x cell types. Optogenetic activation experiments revealed that some drive male courtship song and others regulate male-male interactions – a previously undescribed division of behavioral control! 6/

2) revealed surprising heterogeneity in sensory inputs and premotor outputs across P1/pC1x cell types, suggesting that sensory information is not propagated across the P1/pC1x population, but remains in separate, parallel streams (selected sensory inputs highlighted below). 5/

Leveraging the male CNS connectome, we:

1) found that P1/pC1x neurons disproportionately connect to other sexually-dimorphic cell types known to regulate social behavior, mAL and aSP-a neurons, forming a dense network. 4/

#malecns (collaborative effort with @janelia-flyem.bsky.social @camzoology.bsky.social @mrclmb.bsky.social @jefferis.bsky.social @stuartberg.bsky.social @beckett14.bsky.social @mmcosta.bsky.social Philipp Schlegel and others) split P1/pC1x into 48 cell types based on morphology and connectivity. 3/

Elegant experiments conducted across multiple labs have identified P1/pC1x neurons in males as central integrators of sensory information and regulators of social behaviors.

Yet, how the distinct cell types within the P1/pC1x population contribute to different behaviors was unknown. 2/