Localized inhibition in the Drosophila mushroom body
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Abstract
Many neurons show compartmentalized activity, in which activity does not spread readily across the cell, allowing input and output to occur locally. However, the functional implications of compartmentalized activity for the wider neural circuit are often unclear. We addressed this problem in the Drosophila mushroom body, whose principal neurons, Kenyon cells, receive feedback inhibition from a non-spiking interneuron called APL. We used local stimulation and volumetric calcium imaging to show that APL inhibits Kenyon cells’ dendrites and axons, and that both activity in APL and APL’s inhibitory effect on Kenyon cells are spatially localized (the latter somewhat less so), allowing APL to differentially inhibit different mushroom body compartments. Applying these results to the Drosophila hemibrain connectome predicts that individual Kenyon cells inhibit themselves via APL more strongly than they inhibit other individual Kenyon cells. These findings reveal how cellular physiology and detailed network anatomy can combine to influence circuit function.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1, 2, 2-supplement 1, 3, 4, 7 (Note Fig. 7 includes data from Fig. 5), 7-supplement 1, 8, 8-supplements 2&3. Custom software is available at http://github.com/aclinlab.
Article and author information
Author details
Anthi A Apostolopoulou
Funding
H2020 European Research Council (639489)
- Andrew C Lin
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BB/S016031/1)
- Andrew C Lin
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Amin 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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Localized inhibition in the Drosophila mushroom body
eLife 9:e56954.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56954
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