Inter-individual stereotypy of the Platynereis larval visual connectome

Abstract

Developmental programs have the fidelity to form neural circuits with the same structure and function among individuals of the same species. It is less well understood, however, to what extent entire neural circuits of different individuals are similar. In a previous paper (Randel et al., 2014) we reported the neuronal connectome of the visual eye circuit from the head of a Platynereis dumerilii larva. We now report a full-body serial section transmission electron microscopy (ssTEM) dataset of another larva of the same age, for which we describe the connectome of the visual eyes and the larval eyespots. Anatomical comparisons and quantitative analyses of the two circuits reveal a high inter-individual stereotypy of the cell complement, neuronal projections and synaptic connectivity, including the left-right asymmetry in the connectivity of some neurons. Our work shows the extent to which the eye circuitry in Platynereis larvae is hard-wired.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Nadine Randel

    Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Réza Shahidi

    Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Csaba Verasztó

    Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Luis A Bezares-Calderón

    Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Steffen Schmidt

    Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Gáspár Jékely

    Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
    For correspondence
    gaspar.jekely@tuebingen.mpg.de
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Copyright

© 2015, Randel et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 1,781
    views
  • 315
    downloads
  • 58
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Nadine Randel
  2. Réza Shahidi
  3. Csaba Verasztó
  4. Luis A Bezares-Calderón
  5. Steffen Schmidt
  6. Gáspár Jékely
(2015)
Inter-individual stereotypy of the Platynereis larval visual connectome
eLife 4:e08069.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08069

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08069

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    2. Physics of Living Systems
    Moritz Schloetter, Georg U Maret, Christoph J Kleineidam
    Research Article

    Neurons generate and propagate electrical pulses called action potentials which annihilate on arrival at the axon terminal. We measure the extracellular electric field generated by propagating and annihilating action potentials and find that on annihilation, action potentials expel a local discharge. The discharge at the axon terminal generates an inhomogeneous electric field that immediately influences target neurons and thus provokes ephaptic coupling. Our measurements are quantitatively verified by a powerful analytical model which reveals excitation and inhibition in target neurons, depending on position and morphology of the source-target arrangement. Our model is in full agreement with experimental findings on ephaptic coupling at the well-studied Basket cell-Purkinje cell synapse. It is able to predict ephaptic coupling for any other synaptic geometry as illustrated by a few examples.

    1. Neuroscience
    Sven Ohl, Martin Rolfs
    Research Article

    Detecting causal relations structures our perception of events in the world. Here, we determined for visual interactions whether generalized (i.e. feature-invariant) or specialized (i.e. feature-selective) visual routines underlie the perception of causality. To this end, we applied a visual adaptation protocol to assess the adaptability of specific features in classical launching events of simple geometric shapes. We asked observers to report whether they observed a launch or a pass in ambiguous test events (i.e. the overlap between two discs varied from trial to trial). After prolonged exposure to causal launch events (the adaptor) defined by a particular set of features (i.e. a particular motion direction, motion speed, or feature conjunction), observers were less likely to see causal launches in subsequent ambiguous test events than before adaptation. Crucially, adaptation was contingent on the causal impression in launches as demonstrated by a lack of adaptation in non-causal control events. We assessed whether this negative aftereffect transfers to test events with a new set of feature values that were not presented during adaptation. Processing in specialized (as opposed to generalized) visual routines predicts that the transfer of visual adaptation depends on the feature similarity of the adaptor and the test event. We show that the negative aftereffects do not transfer to unadapted launch directions but do transfer to launch events of different speeds. Finally, we used colored discs to assign distinct feature-based identities to the launching and the launched stimulus. We found that the adaptation transferred across colors if the test event had the same motion direction as the adaptor. In summary, visual adaptation allowed us to carve out a visual feature space underlying the perception of causality and revealed specialized visual routines that are tuned to a launch’s motion direction.