A neuronal circuit architecture for angular integration in Drosophila

By Jonathan Green, Atsuko Adachi, Kunal Shah, Jonathan Hirokawa, P. S. Magani, Gaby Maimon. Nature, 2017

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many animals keep track of their angular heading over time while navigating through their environment. However, a neural-circuit architecture for computing heading has not been experimentally defined in any species. Here we describe a set of clockwise- and anticlockwise-shifting neurons in the Drosophila central complex whose wiring and physiology provide a means to rotate an angular heading estimate based on the fly’s angular velocity. We show that each class of shifting neurons exists in two subtypes, with spatiotemporal activity profiles that suggest different roles for each subtype at the start and end of tethered-walking turns. Shifting neurons are required for the heading system to properly track the fly’s heading in the dark, and stimulation of these neurons induces predictable shifts in the heading signal. The central features of this biological circuit are analogous to those of computational models proposed for head-direction cells in rodents and may shed light on how neural systems, in general, perform integration.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fe55ffb8a37fadc607121392114a8da9bf67c42

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

1. Mikail Khona
2. V. Jayaraman
3. Gerald M. Rubin
4. Ila Rani Fiete
5. Yoshinori Aso
6. Glenn C. Turner

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Mikail Khona
2. V. Jayaraman
3. Gerald M. Rubin
4. Ila Rani Fiete
5. Yoshua Bengio
6. Chaopeng Shen

In Plant Science

1. Mikail Khona
2. Ila Rani Fiete

Citations in the corpus

• A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection (2020, background): “Within the PB, FB columnar neurons inherit a head direction bump directly from EPG neurons and indirectly through Δ7 neurons (Figure 68Bi) (Franconville et al., 2018; Green et al., 2017; Turner-Evans et al., 2017; Turner-Evans et al., 2020).”
• Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, methodology): “In a striking example of convergent evolution [155, 151], Drosophila compute HD estimates using apparently very similar dynamics [156, 157, 153, 152].”