A common evolutionary origin for the ON- and OFF-edge motion detection pathways of the Drosophila visual system

作者:Shinomiya Kazunori; Takemura Shin ya; Rivlin Patricia K; Plaza Stephen M; Scheffer Louis K; Meinertzhagen Ian A*
来源:Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 2015, 9: 33.
DOI:10.3389/fncir.2015.00033

摘要

Synaptic circuits for identified behaviors in the Drosophila brain have typically been considered from either a developmental or functional perspective without reference to how the circuits might have been inherited from ancestral forms. For example, two candidate pathways for ON- and OFF-edge motion detection in the visual system act via circuits that use respectively either 14 or 15, two cell types of the fourth neuropil, or lobula plate (LOP), that exhibit narrow-field direction-selective responses and provide input to wide field tangential neurons. 14 or 15 both have four subtypes that terminate one each in the four strata of the LOP Representatives are reported in a wide range of Diptera, and both cell types exhibit various similarities in (1) the morphology of their dendritic arbors; (2) their four morphological and functional subtypes; (3) their cholinergic profile in Drosophila; (4) their input from the pathways of L3 cells in the first neuropil, or lamina (LA), and by one of a pair of LA cells, L1 (to the 14 pathway) and L2 (to the T5 pathway); and (5) their innervation by a single, wide-field contralateral tangential neuron from the central brain. Progenitors of both also express the gene atonal early in their proliferation from the inner anlage of the developing optic lobe, being alone among many other cell type progeny to do so. Yet 14 receives input in the second neuropil, or medulla (ME), and 15 in the third neuropil or lobula (LO). Here we suggest that these two cell types were originally one, that their ancestral cell population duplicated and split to innervate separate ME and LO neuropils, and that a fiber crossing the internal chiasma arose between the two neuropils. The split most plausibly occurred, we suggest, with the formation of the LO as a new neuropil that formed when it separated from its ancestral neuropil to leave the ME, suggesting additionally that ME input neurons to 14 and 15 may also have had a common origin.

  • 出版日期2015-7-9