How do neurons compute the direction of motion?

Date

Nov 29, 2018

Time

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Speaker

Prof. Alexander Borst

Affiliation

Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Department: Circuits - Computation - Models

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Other Topics

Biologie, Medizin

Host

Dr. Veronika Kuscha

Description

AbstractDetecting the direction of image motion is important for visual navigation as well as predator, prey and mate detection, and thus essential for the survival of all animals that have eyes. However, the direction of motion is not explicitly represented at the level of the photoreceptors: it rather needs to be computed by subsequent neural circuits, involving a comparison of the signals from neighboring photoreceptors over time. The exact nature of this process represents a classic example of neural computation and has been a longstanding question in the field. Only recently, much progress has been made in the fruit fly Drosophila by genetically targeting individual neuron types to block, activate or record from them. Our results obtained this way indicate that the local direction of motion is computed in two parallel ON and OFF pathways. Within each pathway, a retinotopic array of four direction-selective T4 (ON) and T5 (OFF) cells represents the four Cartesian components of local motion vectors. Since none of their presynaptic neurons turned out to be directionally selective, direction selectivity first emerges within T4 and T5 cells. Our present research focuses on the cellular and biophysical mechanisms by which this important visual cue is computed in these neurons. 5 most recent papersJoesch M, Schnell B, Raghu SV, Reiff DF, Borst A (2010) ON and OFF pathways in Drosophila motion vision. Nature 468: 300-304. Maisak MS, Haag J, Ammer G, Serbe E, Meier M, Leonhardt A, Schilling T, Bahl A, Rubin GM, Nern A, Dickson BJ, Reiff DF, Hopp E, Borst A (2013) A directional tuning map of Drosophila elementary motion detectors. Nature 500: 212-216. Mauss AS, Pankova K, Arenz A, Nern A, Rubin GM, Borst A (2015) Neural circuit to integrate opposing motions in the visual field. Cell 162: 351-362. Haag J, Arenz A, Serbe E, Gabbiani F, Borst A (2016) Complementary mechanisms create direction selectivity in the fly. eLife 5: e17421. Arenz A, Drews MS, Richter FG, Ammer G, Borst A (2017) The temporal tuning of the Drosophila motion detectors is determined by the dynamics of their input elements. Curr Biol 27: 929-944.

Links

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Last modified: Nov 29, 2018, 1:07:40 AM