Seung H Sebastian
Neuroscience Institute and Computer Science Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Nature. 2024 Oct;634(8032):113-123. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07953-5. Epub 2024 Oct 2.
As connectomics advances, it will become commonplace to know far more about the structure of a nervous system than about its function. The starting point for many investigations will become neuronal wiring diagrams, which will be interpreted to make theoretical predictions about function. Here I demonstrate this emerging approach with the Drosophila optic lobe, analysing its structure to predict that three Dm3 (refs. ) and three TmY (refs. ) cell types are part of a circuit that serves the function of form vision. Receptive fields are predicted from connectivity, and suggest that the cell types encode the local orientation of a visual stimulus. Extraclassical receptive fields are also predicted, with implications for robust orientation tuning, position invariance and completion of noisy or illusory contours. The TmY types synapse onto neurons that project from the optic lobe to the central brain, which are conjectured to compute conjunctions and disjunctions of oriented features. My predictions can be tested through neurophysiology, which would constrain the parameters and biophysical mechanisms in neural network models of fly vision.
随着连接组学的发展,对神经系统结构的了解远超其功能将变得司空见惯。许多研究的起点将是神经元连接图,这些图将被解读以对功能进行理论预测。在这里,我以果蝇视叶为例展示这种新兴方法,分析其结构以预测三种Dm3(参考文献)和三种TmY(参考文献)细胞类型是一个服务于形状视觉功能的回路的一部分。根据连接性预测感受野,这表明这些细胞类型编码视觉刺激的局部方向。还预测了超经典感受野,这对稳健的方向调谐、位置不变性以及噪声或虚幻轮廓的完成具有影响。TmY类型与从视叶投射到中枢脑的神经元形成突触,推测这些神经元用于计算定向特征的合取和析取。我的预测可以通过神经生理学进行检验,这将限制果蝇视觉神经网络模型中的参数和生物物理机制。