Allgemein

Miriam defended her PhD thesis

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

Madhura’s and Katja’s paper is out in Current Biology

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

An interview about our work, and our new home in Mainz

... can be found here

Sebastian’s paper is out in eLife

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.

Burak’s paper is now online!

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.

Two out of three. We rocked the Breaking News Session (NWG meeting)

Madhura and Sebastian have both podiumed at the Breaking News‘ Best Paper Award in 2019 at the Göttingen Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society (NWG).

Photo of NWG award 2019 — Private photo showing Madhura Ketkar (left), Marion Silies (centre), Sebastian M. Molina Obando (right)

Sebastian Mauricio Molina Obando
has received a second place for his short talk "A combination of GABA- and glutamate-gated chloride channels mediates ON selectivity in the Drosophila visual system".

Madhura Ketkar
was awarded a third place for her presentation "A luminance-sensitive cell type in Drosophila facilitates visual contrast computation".

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.