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We are very excited to see our recent work on global motion processing in Drosophila  published in Science Advances. The population of local motion detectors, T4/T5, encodes six different optic flow patterns generated by self-motion. This work brings together  puzzle pieces about how local motion is encoded from a hexagonally arranged fly eye, and how global motion can be computed from many local motion detectors.

Time to pop the champagne!
Congratulations to Freya for obtaining a TransMed fellowship right at the start of her PhD!
And congratulations to Miriam who won the Bernstein SmartSteps Award for her work on global motion processing.
You can read more about it here, and if you haven't, you should definitely watch Miriam's talk here.

Check out our new preprint "First-order visual interneurons distribute distinct contrast and luminance information across ON and OFF pathways to achieve stable behavior". This collaborative work by Madhura, Burak and Sebastian explores luminance invariance in the Drosophila ON pathway and redefines the input architecture to fly visual circuitry: The first order interneurons L1, L2 and L3 are not pathway specific but all distribute distinct types of information to both ON and OFF pathways.

Madhura defended her PhD thesis “Strategies for dynamic vision in the Drosophila peripheral visual system”. Congratulations to an excellent thesis, and a well-deserved summa cum laude degree!

Check out our paper "The physiological basis for contrast opponency in motion detection in Drosophila", now published in Nature Communications.
Using computational modelling and in vivo two photon calcium imaging, Luis' revealed the biological substrate for motion computation. This work shows how a key neuronal computation is implemented by its constituent neuronal circuit elements to ensure direction selectivity. Congratulations, Luis!

Congratulation to Miriam Henning, who not only defended her PhD thesis "Mechanisms of local and global motion computation", but did so with excellence

How can visual systems deal with fast and dynamically changing light conditions? Our work on the role of luminance sensitivity for the accurate computation of contrast is now online in Current Biology

... can be found here

Many sensory systems split information into distinct ON and OFF channels. You can read here how this ON/OFF dichotomy is implemented in the Drosophila visual system. Also, some cool (we think) new pharmacogenetics reagents in here, that add molecular specificity to pharmacology.

We have a learned a lot about the peripheral circuitry that processes visual motion, but how do individual neurons achieve their distinct processing properties?
Burak set out to answer this question and identified a role for two potassium channels in defining the initial visual processing stages. This is now out in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A, in a special edition on insect vision, edited by Uwe Homberg.