University of California Berkeley, 131 Weill Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2022 Apr;73:102514. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2021.12.001. Epub 2022 Feb 20.
Insects can perform impressive feats of navigation, suggesting a sophisticated sense of direction and an ability to choose appropriate trajectories toward ethological goals. The hypothesized substrate for these navigational abilities is the central complex (CX), a midline brain structure with orderly topology. The circuit transformations performed by the CX are now being concretely described by recent advances in the study of fruit fly neural circuits. An emerging theme is dynamic representation of navigational variables (e.g. heading or travel direction) computed in a manner distributed across specific neuronal populations. These representations are shaped by multimodal inputs whose weights evolve rapidly as surroundings change. Investigation of CX circuits is revealing with precise detail how structured wiring and synaptic plasticity enable neural circuits to flexibly subsample from the currently available sensory and motor cues to build a stable and accurate map of space. Given the sensory richness of natural environments, these findings are encouraging insect neuroscientists to no longer ask which cues insects use to navigate, but instead which cues can insects use, and under which contexts.
昆虫能够完成令人惊叹的导航壮举，这表明它们具有复杂的方向感和选择合适轨迹以实现行为目标的能力。这些导航能力的假设基础是中央复合体（CX），这是一种具有有序拓扑结构的中线脑结构。最近在研究果蝇神经回路方面的进展，具体描述了 CX 进行的电路转换。一个新兴的主题是，导航变量（例如航向或行进方向）的动态表示以分布式方式在特定神经元群体中计算。这些表示受到多模态输入的影响，其权重会随着环境的变化而迅速变化。对 CX 电路的研究揭示了，特定的布线和突触可塑性如何使神经回路能够灵活地从当前可用的感觉和运动线索中进行抽样，以构建稳定准确的空间地图。鉴于自然环境的丰富感官，这些发现鼓励昆虫神经科学家不再询问昆虫使用哪些线索来导航，而是询问昆虫可以使用哪些线索，以及在哪些情况下可以使用。
