A Higher Brain Circuit for Immediate Integration of Conflicting Sensory Information in Drosophila.

By Laurence P. Lewis, K. Siju, A. Bulteel, Gerald M. Rubin, I. G. Kadow, Yoshinori Aso, Anja B. Friedrich, Ilona C. Grunwald Kadow. 2015

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Animals continuously evaluate sensory information to decide on their next action. Different sensory cues, however, often demand opposing behavioral responses. How does the brain process conflicting sensory information during decision making? Here, we show that flies use neural substrates attributed to odor learning and memory, including the mushroom body (MB), for immediate sensory integration and modulation of innate behavior. Drosophila melanogaster must integrate contradictory sensory information during feeding on fermenting fruit that releases both food odor and the innately aversive odor CO2. Here, using this framework, we examine the neural basis for this integration. We have identified a local circuit consisting of specific glutamatergic output and PAM dopaminergic input neurons with overlapping innervation in the MB-β'2 lobe region, which integrates food odor and suppresses innate avoidance. Activation of food odor-responsive dopaminergic neurons reduces innate avoidance mediated by CO2-responsive MB output neurons. We hypothesize that the MB, in addition to its long recognized role in learning and memory, serves as the insect's brain center for immediate sensory integration during instantaneous decision making.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Coordinated and Compartmentalized Neuromodulation Shapes Sensory Processing in Drosophila (2015, positive): “Indeed, the mushroom body plays a role in the context-dependent processing of odor signals, modulating innate olfactory preferences in response to ongoing changes to a fly's environment or internal state (Lewis et al., 2015; Owald et al., 2015).”
Do the right thing: neural network mechanisms of memory formation, expression and update in Drosophila (2018, background): “By re-routing information throughout the MBON network, the mushroom body can therefore integrate context and internal state with sensory stimuli to direct the most appropriate behavior [21,56].”
The complete connectome of a learning and memory centre in an insect brain (2017, background): “…and visual KCs, and of other non-MB inputs onto some MBONs makes them ﬂexible sites for learning and integration of multisensory and internal state information (via DANs, as suggested by functional studies in the adult 19;28;44;45 , and possibly via the “other” new non-MB inputs identiﬁed here).”
The Drosophila Mushroom Body: From Architecture to Algorithm in a Learning Circuit. (2020, background): “Although KCs have only seven or so dendritic inputs, these cells cannot be driven to spike by activating only one of them (Groschner et al. 2018, Gruntman & Turner 2013, Li et al. 2013).”
Spaced Training Forms Complementary Long-Term Memories of Opposite Valence in Drosophila (2019, unknown): “, 2019) and unlearned behavioral responses to volatile cues (Lin et al., 2014; Lewis et al., 2015).”
A connectome of a learning and memory center in the adult Drosophila brain (2017, background): “Dopaminergic modulation has been proposed to play a general role in routing of information through the MB to different downstream neurons (Cohn et al., 2015; Lewis et al., 2015; Perisse et al., 2016).”