A projectome of the bumblebee central complex
- Lund University, Sweden
- University of Queensland, Australia
Abstract
Insects have evolved diverse and remarkable strategies for navigating in various ecologies all over the world. Regardless of species, insects share the presence of a group of morphologically conserved neuropils known collectively as the central complex (CX). The CX is a navigational center, involved in sensory integration and coordinated motor activity. Despite the fact that our understanding of navigational behavior comes predominantly from ants and bees, most of what we know about the underlying neural circuitry of such behavior comes from work in fruit flies. Here we aim to close this gap, by providing the first comprehensive map of all major columnar neurons and their projection patterns in the CX of a bee. We find numerous components of the circuit that appear to be highly conserved between the fly and the bee, but also highlight several key differences which are likely to have important functional rami1cations.
Data availability
Neuron morphologies presented in this paper have been deposited as interactive datasets in the InsectBrainDatabase with accession numbers EIN-0000061 (126nm data) and EIN-0000062 (24nm data). These are available for interactive viewing as well as download.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
H2020 European Research Council (714599)
- Stanley Heinze
Swedish Research Council (2018-04851 and 621-2012-2213)
- Stanley Heinze
Australian Research Council
- Rachel Templin
Australian Research Foundation
- Rachel Templin
Air Force Office for Scientific Research
- Rachel Templin
International Cotutelle Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (iMQRES 2019060)
- Marcel Ethan Sayre
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2021, Sayre 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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A projectome of the bumblebee central complex
eLife 10:e68911.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.68911
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