1. Neuroscience

A common directional tuning mechanism of Drosophila motion-sensing neurons in the ON and in the OFF pathway

  1. Juergen Haag  Is a corresponding author
  2. Abhishek Mishra
  3. Alexander Borst
  1. Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology, Germany
  2. Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Germany
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29044
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  1. Juergen Haag
  2. Abhishek Mishra
  3. Alexander Borst
(2017)
A common directional tuning mechanism of Drosophila motion-sensing neurons in the ON and in the OFF pathway
eLife 6:e29044.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29044
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Abstract

In the fruit fly optic lobe, T4 and T5 cells represent the first direction-selective neurons, with T4 cells responding selectively to moving brightness increments (ON) and T5 cells to brightness decrements (OFF). Both T4 and T5 cells comprise four subtypes with directional tuning to one of the four cardinal directions. We had previously found that upward-sensitive T4 cells implement both preferred direction enhancement and null direction suppression (Haag et al, 2016). Here, we asked whether this mechanism generalizes to OFF-selective T5 cells and to all four subtypes of both cell classes. We found that all four subtypes of both T4 and T5 cells implement both mechanisms, i.e. preferred direction enhancement and null direction inhibition, on opposing sides of their receptive fields. This gives rise to the high degree of direction selectivity observed in both T4 and T5 cells within each subpopulation.

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Author details

  1. Juergen Haag

    Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany
    For correspondence
    haag@neuro.mpg.de
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6535-0103

  2. Abhishek Mishra

    Max-Planck-Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1933-1251

  3. Alexander Borst

    Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried, Germany
    Competing interests
    Alexander Borst, Reviewing editor, eLife.

Funding

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

  • Juergen Haag
  • Abhishek Mishra
  • Alexander Borst

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 870)

  • Juergen Haag
  • Abhishek Mishra
  • Alexander Borst

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

© 2017, Haag 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.

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  1. Juergen Haag
  2. Abhishek Mishra
  3. Alexander Borst
(2017)
A common directional tuning mechanism of Drosophila motion-sensing neurons in the ON and in the OFF pathway
eLife 6:e29044.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29044

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29044

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Further reading

    1. Neuroscience

    Complementary mechanisms create direction selectivity in the fly

    Juergen Haag, Alexander Arenz ... Alexander Borst
    Research Article

    How neurons become sensitive to the direction of visual motion represents a classic example of neural computation. Two alternative mechanisms have been discussed in the literature so far: preferred direction enhancement, by which responses are amplified when stimuli move along the preferred direction of the cell, and null direction suppression, where one signal inhibits the response to the subsequent one when stimuli move along the opposite, i.e. null direction. Along the processing chain in the Drosophila optic lobe, directional responses first appear in T4 and T5 cells. Visually stimulating sequences of individual columns in the optic lobe with a telescope while recording from single T4 neurons, we find both mechanisms at work implemented in different sub-regions of the receptive field. This finding explains the high degree of directional selectivity found already in the fly’s primary motion-sensing neurons and marks an important step in our understanding of elementary motion detection.