The Cellular Organization of Zebrafish Visuomotor Circuits

Week-old zebrafish execute many complex, visually guided actions using a brain that displays the canonical vertebrate organization, but is less than a cubic millimeter in size. Recent studies have made considerable progress towards understanding the underlying neural circuit basis of these innate responses, at two fundamental levels. Large-scale population recordings have revealed how functional properties and activity dynamics are organized within and across brain regions. Meanwhile, single neurons have been specifically labeled to systematically characterize cell types with distinct morphologies and projection patterns. Combining these approaches, in order to investigate the role of individual, identified neurons in generating neural activity dynamics and behavior, has traditionally been possible only for simple invertebrate systems, but is now becoming feasible in a vertebrate model.