Abstract
The perception of motion is an important func-tion of vision.Neural wiring diagrams for extracting direc-tional information have been obtained by connectome recon-struction.Direction selectivity in Drosophila is thought to originate in T4/T5 neurons through integrating inputs with different temporal filtering properties.Through genetic screening based on synaptic distribution,we isolated a new type of TmY neuron,termed TmY-ds,that form recipro-cal synaptic connections with T4/T5 neurons.Its neurites responded to grating motion along the four cardinal direc-tions and showed a variety of direction selectivity.Intrigu-ingly,its direction selectivity originated from temporal filtering neurons rather than T4/T5.Genetic silencing and activation experiments showed that TmY-ds neurons are functionally upstream of T4/T5.Our results suggest that direction selectivity is generated in a tripartite circuit formed among these three neurons—temporal filtering,TmY-ds,and T4/T5 neurons,in which TmY-ds plays a role in the enhancement of direction selectivity in T4/T5 neurons.
基金项目
National Natural Science Foundation of China(61890950)
National Natural Science Foundation of China(31871027)
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities/HUST(2016YXMS034)
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities/HUST(2014TS015)
Director Fund of WNLO,and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation(2015T80788)