Persistent activity in a recurrent circuit underlies courtship memory in Drosophila
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
- Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Austria
Abstract
Recurrent connections are thought to be a common feature of the neural circuits that encode memories, but how memories are laid down in such circuits is not fully understood. Here we present evidence that courtship memory in Drosophila relies on the recurrent circuit between mushroom body gamma (MBg), M6 output, and aSP13 dopaminergic neurons. We demonstrate persistent neuronal activity of aSP13 neurons and show that it transiently potentiates synaptic transmission from MBγ>M6 neurons. M6 neurons in turn provide input to aSP13 neurons, prolonging potentiation of MBγ>M6 synapses over time periods that match short-term memory. These data support a model in which persistent aSP13 activity within a recurrent circuit lays the foundation for a short-term memory.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Barry Dickson
- Krystyna Keleman
Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH-IMP
- Barry Dickson
- Krystyna Keleman
Austrian Science Fund (FWF P24499 to KK)
- Krystyna Keleman
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Zhao 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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Persistent activity in a recurrent circuit underlies courtship memory in Drosophila
eLife 7:e31425.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31425
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