PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Laiyong Mu
AU  - Kei Ito
AU  - Jonathan P. Bacon
AU  - Nicholas J. Strausfeld
TI  - Optic Glomeruli and Their Inputs in <em>Drosophila</em> Share an Organizational Ground Pattern with the Antennal Lobes
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0221-12.2012
DP  - 2012 May 02
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 6061--6071
VI  - 32
IP  - 18
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/18/6061.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/18/6061.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2012 May 02; 32
AB  - Studying the insect visual system provides important data on the basic neural mechanisms underlying visual processing. As in vertebrates, the first step in visual processing in insects is through a series of retinotopic neurons. Recent studies on flies have found that these converge onto assemblies of columnar neurons in the lobula, the axons of which segregate to project to discrete optic glomeruli in the lateral protocerebrum. This arrangement is much like the fly's olfactory system, in which afferents target uniquely identifiable olfactory glomeruli. Here, whole-cell patch recordings show that even though visual primitives are unreliably encoded by single lobula output neurons because of high synaptic noise, they are reliably encoded by the ensemble of outputs. At a glomerulus, local interneurons reliably code visual primitives, as do projection neurons conveying information centrally from the glomerulus. These observations demonstrate that in Drosophila, as in other dipterans, optic glomeruli are involved in further reconstructing the fly's visual world. Optic glomeruli and antennal lobe glomeruli share the same ancestral anatomical and functional ground pattern, enabling reliable responses to be extracted from converging sensory inputs.