The computation of directional selectivity in the Drosophila OFF motion pathway

Abstract
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Abstract

In flies, the direction of moving ON and OFF features is computed separately. T4 (ON) and T5 (OFF) are the first neurons in their respective pathways to extract a directionally selective response from their non-selective inputs. Our recent study of T4 found that the integration of offset depolarizing and hyperpolarizing inputs is critical for the generation of directional selectivity. However, T5s lack small-field inhibitory inputs, suggesting they may use a different mechanism. Here we used whole-cell recordings of T5 neurons and found a similar receptive field structure: fast depolarization and persistent, spatially offset hyperpolarization. By assaying pairwise interactions of local stimulation across the receptive field, we found no amplifying responses, only suppressive responses to the non-preferred motion direction. We then evaluated passive, biophysical models and found that a model using direct inhibition, but not the removal of excitation, can accurately predict T5 responses to a range of moving stimuli.

Data availability

All data collected in this study that is summarized in the figures has been made available on FigShare, at doi: 10.25378/janelia.c.4771805.v1. Figure plotting code has been made available together with the data. The code used to simulate the T5 models and to generate the model data has been made available on https://github.com/reiserlab/T5ConductanceModel.git.

The following data sets were generated

(2019) The computation of directional selectivity in the Drosophila OFF motion pathway
FigShare, doi:10.25378/janelia.c.4771805.v1.

https://doi.org/10.25378/janelia.c.4771805.v1

Article and author information

Author details

Eyal Gruntman

Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Sandro Romani

Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States

For correspondence
romanis@janelia.hhmi.org

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Michael B Reiser

Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, United States

For correspondence
reiserm@janelia.hhmi.org

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4108-4517

Funding

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Michael B Reiser

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Sandro Romani

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

Copyright

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.