Angular velocity integration in a fly heading circuit

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Animal Behavior
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Animals utilize an internal heading representation for navigation.
• A compass representation was previously identified in Drosophila melanogaster's central complex.
• Spatial navigation relies on integrating heading and movement information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify neural populations encoding heading and angular velocity in Drosophila.
• To elucidate the mechanism for updating heading representation during turns in darkness.
• To compare the fly's navigation mechanism with theoretical models.

Main Methods:

• Two-photon calcium imaging in head-fixed walking flies.
• Electrophysiology recordings in Drosophila melanogaster.
• Analysis of neural responses to turning stimuli.

Main Results:

• A novel neural population conjunctively encodes heading and angular velocity.
• This population exhibits selective excitation for clockwise or counterclockwise turns.
• Mirror-symmetric turn responses and recurrent connectivity form a heading update mechanism.

Conclusions:

• The identified neural circuit provides an elegant mechanism for updating heading representation in darkness.
• This mechanism shares similarities with theoretical models for rodent head direction cells.
• The findings highlight structure-function matching in a fundamental neural computation.