Madhura’s hat-trick: Ketkar et al. #3 now published in Current Biology

Madhura teamed up with Shuai from the Gjorgjeva group to show that luminance gain control past photoreceptors is multi-faceted. Madhura and Shuai combined imaging and behavioral experiment with computational modeling to show that a single luminance-sensitive visual pathways (via L3 neurons) implements gain control at both fast and slow time scales. This computation is bidirectional in that it prevents underestimation of contrast in low luminance and overestimation of contrast in high luminance. It's remarkable how a single neuronal pathway can perform diverse computation to ensure stable processing of visual stimuli.

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.