ON selectivity in the Drosophila visual system is a multisynaptic process involving both glutamatergic and GABAergic inhibition.

ABSTRACT: Sensory systems sequentially extract increasingly complex features. ON and OFF pathways, for example, encode increases or decreases of a stimulus from a common input. This ON/OFF pathway split is thought to occur at individual synaptic connections through a sign-inverting synapse in one of the pathways. Here, we show that ON selectivity is a multisynaptic process in the Drosophila visual system. A pharmacogenetics approach demonstrates that both glutamatergic inhibition through GluClα and GABAergic inhibition through Rdl mediate ON responses. Although neurons postsynaptic to the glutamatergic ON pathway input L1 lose all responses in GluClα mutants, they are resistant to a cell-type-specific loss of GluClα. This shows that ON selectivity is distributed across multiple

SUBMITTER: Molina-Obando S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6845231 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature