The Holy Grail of Fly Motion Vision
Alexander Borst
CNCB Seminar Series
Monday, 24 November 2014, 12pm to 1pm
Oxford Martin School, Old Indian Institute, 34 Broad Street (corner of Holywell and Catte Streets), Oxford, OX1 3BD.
If you have a question about this talk, please contact Fiona Woods.
Because motion information is important for many aspects of animal life, di-rectionally selective neurons are found in virtually all visual systems. In flies, a mathematical model developed more than 50 years ago, the so-called ‘Reichardt detector’, describes how directional information is extracted from photoreceptor signals. In this model, the luminance values of adjacent photo-receptors are multiplied after differential temporal filtering. This is done twice in a mirror-symmetrical way, and the output values of the multipliers are finally subtracted from each other. Discovering the neural implementation of this algorithmically defined computation has been the ‘Holy Grail’ of fly motion vision. We recently identified the input and output neurons of parallel circuits processing moving brightness increments (ON pathway) and decrements (OFF pathway). Current work seeks to complete our understanding of Dro-sophila’s motion detection circuitry.