Long-timescale anti-directional rotation in optomotor behavior.

Locomotor movements cause visual images to be displaced across the eye, a retinal slip that is counteracted by stabilizing reflexes in many animals. In insects, optomotor turning causes the animal to turn in the direction of rotating visual stimuli, thereby reducing retinal slip and stabilizing trajectories through the world. This behavior has formed the basis for extensive dissections of motion vision.

Long timescale anti-directional rotation in Drosophila optomotor behavior.

Locomotor movements cause visual images to be displaced across the eye, a retinal slip that is counteracted by stabilizing reflexes in many animals. In insects, optomotor turning causes the animal to turn in the direction of rotating visual stimuli, thereby reducing retinal slip and stabilizing trajectories through the world. This behavior has formed the basis for extensive dissections of motion vision.

Predicting individual neuron responses with anatomically constrained task optimization.

Artificial neural networks trained to solve sensory tasks can develop statistical representations that match those in biological circuits. However, it remains unclear whether they can reproduce properties of individual neurons. Here, we investigated how artificial networks predict individual neuron properties in the visual motion circuits of the fruit fly Drosophila.

Dermal Adipocyte Lipolysis and Myofibroblast Conversion Are Required for Efficient Skin Repair.

Mature adipocytes store fatty acids and are a common component of tissue stroma. Adipocyte function in regulating bone marrow, skin, muscle, and mammary gland biology is emerging, but the role of adipocyte-derived lipids in tissue homeostasis and repair is poorly understood. Here, we identify an essential role for adipocyte lipolysis in regulating inflammation and repair after injury in skin.

Using slow frame rate imaging to extract fast receptive fields.

In functional imaging, large numbers of neurons are measured during sensory stimulation or behavior. This data can be used to map receptive fields that describe neural associations with stimuli or with behavior. The temporal resolution of these receptive fields has traditionally been limited by image acquisition rates.

A flexible geometry for panoramic visual and optogenetic stimulation during behavior and physiology.

Background: To study visual processing, it is necessary to precisely control visual stimuli while recording neural and behavioral responses. It can be important to present stimuli over a broad area of the visual field, which can be technically difficult.

New Method: We present a simple geometry that can be used to display panoramic stimuli.

Visual Control of Walking Speed in Drosophila.

An animal's self-motion generates optic flow across its retina, and it can use this visual signal to regulate its orientation and speed through the world. While orientation control has been studied extensively in Drosophila and other insects, much less is known about the visual cues and circuits that regulate translational speed. Here, we show that flies regulate walking speed with an algorithm that is tuned to the speed of visual motion, causing them to slow when visual objects are nearby.

Sidekick is required in developing photoreceptors to enable visual motion detection.

The assembly of functional neuronal circuits requires growth cones to extend in defined directions and recognize the correct synaptic partners. Homophilic adhesion between vertebrate Sidekick proteins promotes synapse formation between retinal neurons involved in visual motion detection. We show here that Sidekick accumulates in specific synaptic layers of the developing motion detection circuit and is necessary for normal optomotor behavior.

Graphics Processing Unit-Accelerated Code for Computing Second-Order Wiener Kernels and Spike-Triggered Covariance.

Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand and predict how sensory neurons respond to stimuli. Nonlinear components of neural responses are frequently characterized by the second-order Wiener kernel and the closely-related spike-triggered covariance (STC). Recent advances in data acquisition have made it increasingly common and computationally intensive to compute second-order Wiener kernels/STC matrices.

Direct Measurement of Correlation Responses in Drosophila Elementary Motion Detectors Reveals Fast Timescale Tuning.

Animals estimate visual motion by integrating light intensity information over time and space. The integration requires nonlinear processing, which makes motion estimation circuitry sensitive to specific spatiotemporal correlations that signify visual motion. Classical models of motion estimation weight these correlations to produce direction-selective signals.