The neural basis for a persistent internal state in Drosophila females
- Princeton University, United States
- European Neuroscience Institute, Germany
Abstract
Sustained changes in mood or action require persistent changes in neural activity, but it has been difficult to identify the neural circuit mechanisms that underlie persistent activity and contribute to long-lasting changes in behavior. Here, we show that a subset of Doublesex+ pC1 neurons in the Drosophila female brain, called pC1d/e, can drive minutes-long changes in female behavior in the presence of males. Using automated reconstruction of a volume electron microscopic (EM) image of the female brain, we map all inputs and outputs to both pC1d and pC1e. This reveals strong recurrent connectivity between, in particular, pC1d/e neurons and a specific subset of Fruitless+ neurons called aIPg. We additionally find that pC1d/e activation drives long-lasting persistent neural activity in brain areas and cells overlapping with the pC1d/e neural network, including both Doublesex+ and Fruitless+ neurons. Our work thus links minutes-long persistent changes in behavior with persistent neural activity and recurrent circuit architecture in the female brain.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (RF1 MH117815-01)
- Mala Murthy
National Institutes of Health (R01 NS104899)
- Mala Murthy
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Faculty Scholar)
- Mala Murthy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Deutsch 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
-
- 6,274
- views
-
- 634
- downloads
-
- 73
- 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)
The neural basis for a persistent internal state in Drosophila females
eLife 9:e59502.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.59502
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
The brain predicts regularities in sensory inputs at multiple complexity levels, with neuronal mechanisms that remain elusive. Here, we monitored auditory cortex activity during the local-global paradigm, a protocol nesting different regularity levels in sound sequences. We observed that mice encode local predictions based on stimulus occurrence and stimulus transition probabilities, because auditory responses are boosted upon prediction violation. This boosting was due to both short-term adaptation and an adaptation-independent surprise mechanism resisting anesthesia. In parallel, and only in wakefulness, VIP interneurons responded to the omission of the locally expected sound repeat at the sequence ending, thus providing a chunking signal potentially useful for establishing global sequence structure. When this global structure was violated, by either shortening the sequence or ending it with a locally expected but globally unexpected sound transition, activity slightly increased in VIP and PV neurons, respectively. Hence, distinct cellular mechanisms predict different regularity levels in sound sequences.
-
- Neuroscience
Damage to the synapses connecting hair cells to the auditory nerve leads to undetected hearing impairments.
