Paper on stable contrast processing accepted in eLife

Our work on stable contrast processing is now out in eLife! Our work shows that a luminance gain leads to stable behavior in the ON pathway. This luminance gain is mediated by distinct first-order luminance-sensitive lamina interneurons L1 and L3 of the fly visual system. Contrary to our previous understanding, all lamina neurons give input to both ON and OFF pathways, redefining the input architecture to the fly visual system. The three lamina neurons L1, L2 and L3 distribute distinct contrast and luminance information to enable downstream computations such as motion vision

LAB NEWS

Visual system neurons show variable wiring, now published in Nature Communications!

Brains are complex structures. Even in the small brains of a fruit fly, hundreds of thousands of neurons are connected via millions of synapses. Neuroscience has entered the connectome era, where we try to map and understand with cell type and synapse resolution. We have contributed to a major effort, in which a full adult fly brain was reconstructed and annotated (flywire.ai).

In a big team effort of the lab, we focused on the fly visual system and mapped the presynaptic inputs of several cell types. This work showed that the visual system is by far not as homogenous as text books are trying to tell us. Instead, there is a lot of variability in synaptic connectivity, and even more in some cell types than in others. We’re not only excited by the finding, but also by its implications for future research: Could it be that this variability in wiring is not noise but is there for a reason? We next want to explore whether wiring variability is actually advantageous to encode visual information across the fly eye.

Read the full paper here.