Nonlinear Integration of Visual and Haltere Inputs in Fly Neck Motor Neurons
- Creators
- Huston, Stephen J.
- Krapp, Holger G.
Abstract
Animals use information from multiple sensory organs to generate appropriate behavior. Exactly how these different sensory inputs are fused at the motor system is not well understood. Here we study how fly neck motor neurons integrate information from two well characterized sensory systems: visual information from the compound eye and gyroscopic information from the mechanosensory halteres. Extracellular recordings reveal that a subpopulation of neck motor neurons display "gating-like" behavior: they do not fire action potentials in response to visual stimuli alone but will do so if the halteres are coactivated. Intracellular recordings show that these motor neurons receive small, sustained subthreshold visual inputs in addition to larger inputs that are phase locked to haltere movements. Our results suggest that the nonlinear gating-like effect results from summation of these two inputs with the action potential threshold providing the nonlinearity. As a result of this summation, the sustained visual depolarization is transformed into a temporally structured train of action potentials synchronized to the haltere beating movements. This simple mechanism efficiently fuses two different sensory signals and may also explain the context-dependent effects of visual inputs on fly behavior.
Additional Information
© 2009 Society for Neuroscience. Received June 19, 2009; revised Aug. 21, 2009; accepted Aug. 29, 2009. S.J.H. was supported by a Medical Research Council Ph.D. Studentship. H.G.K. was supported by the Royal Society and by European Office of Aerospace Research and Development Grant FW8655-05-1-3066. We thank J. Niven, T. Matheson, S. Laughlin, K. Longden, and M. Parsons for helpful discussions. We are especially thankful to S. Rogers for providing help both with statistics and with setting up the intracellular electrophysiology. Two anonymous referees provided suggestions that improved this manuscript.Attached Files
Published - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci.pdf
Supplemental Material - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci_figure_1.pdf
Supplemental Material - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci_figure_2.pdf
Supplemental Material - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci_figure_3.pdf
Supplemental Material - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci_figure_4.pdf
Supplemental Material - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci_figure_5.pdf
Supplemental Material - Huston2009p6212J_Neurosci_legend.pdf
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC6665201
- Eprint ID
- 16598
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20091106-094543937
- Medical Research Council (UK)
- Royal Society
- FW8655-05-1-3066
- European Office of Aerospace Research and Development
- Created
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2009-11-16Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-03-04Created from EPrint's last_modified field