A connectome of a learning and memory center in the adult Drosophila brain
By Shin-ya Takemura, Yoshinori Aso, Toshihide Hige, A. Wong, Zhiyuan Lu, C. Xu, P. Rivlin, H. Hess, Ting Zhao, T. Parag and 18 more. 2017
352 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding memory formation, storage and retrieval requires knowledge of the underlying neuronal circuits. In Drosophila, the mushroom body (MB) is the major site of associative learning. We reconstructed the morphologies and synaptic connections of all 983 neurons within the three functional units, or compartments, that compose the adult MB’s α lobe, using a dataset of isotropic 8 nm voxels collected by focused ion-beam milling scanning electron microscopy. We found that Kenyon cells (KCs), whose sparse activity encodes sensory information, each make multiple en passant synapses to MB output neurons (MBONs) in each compartment. Some MBONs have inputs from all KCs, while others differentially sample sensory modalities. Only 6% of KC>MBON synapses receive a direct synapse from a dopaminergic neuron (DAN). We identified two unanticipated classes of synapses, KC>DAN and DAN>MBON. DAN activation produces a slow depolarization of the MBON in these DAN>MBON synapses and can weaken memory recall. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.26975.001
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Ecology, Genetics
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
- Gerald M. Rubin
- Kei Ito
- Zhiyuan Lu
- Gregory S. X. E. Jefferis
- V. Jayaraman
- Ian A. Meinertzhagen
- Hiromu Tanimoto
- Yoshinori Aso
In Ecology
In Genetics
- Gerald M. Rubin
- Kei Ito
- Gregory S. X. E. Jefferis
- V. Jayaraman
- Yoshinori Aso
- S. Waddell
- Hiromu Tanimoto
- V. Ruta
Citations in the corpus
- A connectome and analysis of the adult Drosophila central brain (2020, background): “Previous reconstructions were either dense in much smaller EM volumes (such as Meinertzhagen and O’Neil, 1991; Helmstaedter et al., 2013; Takemura et al., 2017) or sparse in larger volumes (such as Eichler et al.”
- A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection (2020, background): “This recent history gives us reason to expect that connectomics (Eichler et al., 2017; Ohyama et al., 2015; Schlegel et al., 2020; Takemura et al., 2017a; Takemura et al., 2017b; White et al., 1986; Zheng et al., 2018) will continue to accelerate studies of circuit function (Bentley et al., 2016;…”