Laboratory of Integrative Brain Function and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Neurosci. 2019 Sep;22(9):1460-1468. doi: 10.1038/s41593-019-0444-x. Epub 2019 Jul 22.
Goal-directed navigation is thought to rely on the activity of head-direction cells, but how this activity guides moment-to-moment actions remains poorly understood. Here we characterize how heading neurons in the Drosophila central complex guide moment-to-moment navigational behavior. We establish an innate, heading-neuron-dependent, tethered navigational behavior where walking flies maintain a straight trajectory along a specific angular bearing for hundreds of body lengths. While flies perform this task, we use chemogenetics to transiently rotate their neural heading estimate and observe that the flies slow down and turn in a direction that aims to return the heading estimate to the angle it occupied before stimulation. These results support a working model in which the fly brain quantitatively compares an internal estimate of current heading with an internal goal heading and uses the sign and magnitude of the difference to determine which way to turn, how hard to turn and how fast to walk forward.
目标导向导航被认为依赖于头方向细胞的活动，但这种活动如何指导瞬间的动作仍知之甚少。在这里，我们描述了果蝇中枢复合体内的朝向神经元如何引导瞬间的导航行为。我们建立了一种先天的、依赖于朝向神经元的、固定的导航行为，在这种行为中，行走的苍蝇沿着特定的角度保持直线轨迹，长达数百个体长。当苍蝇执行这个任务时，我们使用化学遗传学方法暂时旋转它们的神经朝向估计，观察到苍蝇会减速并转向一个方向，旨在将朝向估计值恢复到刺激前的角度。这些结果支持了一个工作模型，即苍蝇大脑定量地将当前朝向的内部估计与内部目标朝向进行比较，并根据差异的符号和大小来确定转向的方向、转向的力度以及向前行走的速度。
