Contact

If you’re interested in joining the lab, please contact us.

Prof. Dr. Marion Silies

e-mail: msilies@uni-mainz.de
phone: +49 6131 39 28 966
fax: +49 6131 39 28 604
office: 02.152

Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
Institute for Developmental Biology and Neurobiology
Biozentrum I, 2nd Floor north
RG Silies
Hanns-Dieter-Huesch-Weg 15
55128 Mainz
Germany

Administration: Sabine Schmitt

e-mail: sekretariat.silies@uni-mainz.de
phone: +49 6131 39-29833
fax: +49 6131 39-28604
office: 02.156

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.