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Direction Selectivity of TmY Neurites in Drosophila

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Abstract

The perception of motion is an important function of vision. Neural wiring diagrams for extracting directional information have been obtained by connectome reconstruction. 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 reciprocal synaptic connections with T4/T5 neurons. Its neurites responded to grating motion along the four cardinal directions and showed a variety of direction selectivity. Intriguingly, 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.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Yufeng Pan (University of Southeast, China) and the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (NIH P40OD018537) for sharing stocks in this study. We thank Dr. Chi-hon Lee (Academia Sinica, Taipei, China) and CBMP-HUST colleagues, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. We also thank the Optical Bioimaging Core Facility of WNLO-HUST for imaging systems. This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61890950 and 31871027), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities/HUST (2016YXMS034 and 2014TS015), the Director Fund of WNLO, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2015T80788).

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  1. Jin Chang and Wei Zhou contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Yinyin Zhao, Shanshan Ke, Guo Cheng, Xiaohua Lv, Jin Chang & Wei Zhou

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  1. Yinyin Zhao
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Correspondence to Jin Chang or Wei Zhou.

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Zhao, Y., Ke, S., Cheng, G. et al. Direction Selectivity of TmY Neurites in Drosophila. Neurosci. Bull. 39, 759–773 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-022-00966-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-022-00966-y

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