Insect Optic Glomeruli: Exploration of a Universal Circuit for Sensorimotor Processing.

摘要

This report describes an extension of recent studies on Drosophila, demonstrating that retinal relays converge onto assemblies of columnar neurons in the lobula and that these assemblies segregate their axons to discrete optic glomeruli in the lateral protocerebrum. The question addressed by this research was whether this arrangement cotrresponds to that of the fly s olfactory system, where olfactory sensory neurons target uniquely identifiable olfactory glomeruli. We have used whole cell patch recording show that even though visual primitives are unreliably encoded by single lobula output neurons due to high synaptic noise, they are reliably encoded by the ensemble of outputs. At a glomerulus, local interneurons reliably code visual primitives, as do projection neurons conveying information centrally from the glomerulus. These observations demonstrate that in Drosophila, optic glomeruli are involved in further reconstructing the fly s visual world. Optic glomeruli and antennal lobe glomeruli share the same ancestral anatomical and functional ground pattern enabling reliable responses to be extracted from converging sensory inputs.