Whole-brain chemosensory responses of both C. elegans sexes

Sexually-dimorphic neural circuits play a critical role in shaping sex-specific animal behaviors. Maps of the structural dimorphisms in these circuits have been explored by analyzing "synaptic connectomes", electron micrograph reconstructions of synaptic connectivity. Nevertheless, recent studies in the model organism C. elegans have shown little to no correlation between the synaptic connectome and dynamic neural activity. Therefore, the extent of sexual dimorphism in functional neural activity remains unknown. To determine the extent of functional sexual-dimorphisms in C. elegans we compared activity, neuron-by-neuron, across all neurons in the heads of both sexes. To sample a broad view of responses to different sensory modalities, we tested a diverse panel of ethologically-relevant olfactory, gustatory, and chemical stimuli, representing both attractive and aversive cues. We found that nearly every sensory neuron responded dimorphically to at least one cue and monomorphically to other cues, indicating that sexually-dimorphic circuits are pervasive and stimulus dependent. This dimorphic and monomorphic activity was present to a lesser extent in downstream interneurons and even less so in motoneurons, implicating sensory neurons as the primary source and location of sexually-dimorphic activity. Comparing the functional activity we measured to the published synaptic connectomes of both sexes revealed that sexual dimorphism in functional connectivity was distinct from and complementary to sexual dimorphism in synaptic connectivity. Our results provide a first-of-its-kind comparison of whole-brain dynamics between sexes at the level of single neurons, serving as an extensive resource for further investigations of functional sex differences.