Glutamate Signaling in the Fly Visual System

For a proper understanding of neural circuit function, it is important to know which signals neurons relay to their downstream partners. Calcium imaging with genetically encoded calcium sensors like GCaMP has become the default approach for mapping these responses. How well such measurements represent the true neurotransmitter output of any given cell, however, remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate the viability of the glutamate sensor iGluSnFR for 2-photon in vivo imaging in Drosophila melanogaster and prove its usefulness for estimating spatiotemporal receptive fields in the visual system. We compare the results obtained with iGluSnFR with the ones obtained with GCaMP6f and find that the spatial aspects of the receptive fields are preserved between indicators. In the temporal domain, however, measurements obtained with iGluSnFR reveal the underlying response properties to be much faster than those acquired with GCaMP6f. Our approach thus offers a more accurate description of glutamatergic neurons in the fruit fly.