TY  - JOUR
AB  - In the brain, sensory information needs often to be read out from the ensemble activity of presynaptic neurons. In the most basic case, this may be accomplished by an individual postsynaptic neuron. In the visual system of the blowfly, an identified motion-sensitive spiking neuron is known to be postsynaptic to an ensemble of graded-potential presynaptic input elements. Both the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons were shown previously to be capable of representing the velocity of preferred-direction motion reliably and linearly over a large frequency range of velocity fluctuations. Accordingly, the synaptic transfer properties of the connecting excitatory synapses between individual input elements and the postsynaptic neuron were shown to be linear over a similar range of presynaptic membrane potential fluctuations. It was not known, however, how the postsynaptic neuron integrates and reads out the presynaptic ensemble activity. We were able to compare the response properties of the integrating cell before and after eliminating individual presynaptic elements by a laser ablation technique. For most of the input elements, we found that their elimination strongly affected the activity of the postsynaptic neuron but did not degrade its performance to encode motion with constant and time-varying velocity. Our results suggest that the integration of individual synaptic inputs within the neural circuit operates with some redundancy. This feature might help the postsynaptic neuron to encode in a highly robust way the direction and the velocity of self-motion of the animal.
DA  - 2006
DO  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1327-06.2006
KW  - photoablation
KW  - sensory neurons
KW  - invertebrates
KW  - visual motion
KW  - synaptic transmission
KW  - sensory integration
LA  - eng
IS  - 30
M2  - 7898
PY  - 2006
SN  - 0270-6474
SP  - 7898-7906
T2  - JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
TI  - Robust integration of motion information in the fly visual system revealed by single cell photoablation
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-15984145
Y2  - 2024-11-22T05:18:34
ER  -