Funding

We acknowledge past and current support by the following institutions:

ERC Consolidator Grant
Adaptive functions of visual systems "AdaptiveVision"
(Grant Agreement No: 101045003)

ERC Starting Grant:
Microcircuitry of the Drosophila visual system "MicroCyFly"
(Grant Agreement No: 716512)

FOR5289: Research Unit "Robust Circuits"
https://robustcircuit.flygen.org/

CRC 1080: Molecular and cellular mechanisms of neural homeostasis
Project C06: Behavioral and circuit stability in dynamically changing environments
https://www.crc1080.com/

Emmy Noether-Programm (DFG):
The molecular and cellular basis of motion computation

CRC 889: Cellular Mechanisms of Sensory Processing:
Project C08: The role of glutamatergic inhibition in visual processing

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.