Neural representation of goal direction in the monarch butterfly brain
Beetz MJ, Kraus C, El Jundi B. Nature communications, September 2023.
Read the paper Free to read · doi:10.1038/s41467-023-41526-w
What this paper is about
Keeping a heading requires comparing where you are pointing with where you want to go. The first half of that is well understood in insects; the second was not.
Tetrode recordings from tethered monarchs flying under a virtual sun found neurons tuned to the goal direction itself, which shifted when the butterflies reset their heading.
Summarised here from the abstract below. Not the authors’ words.
Abstract
Neural processing of a desired moving direction requires the continuous comparison between the current heading and the goal direction. While the neural basis underlying the current heading is well-studied, the coding of the goal direction remains unclear in insects. Here, we used tetrode recordings in tethered flying monarch butterflies to unravel how a goal direction is represented in the insect brain. While recording, the butterflies maintained robust goal directions relative to a virtual sun. By resetting their goal directions, we found neurons whose spatial tuning was tightly linked to the goal directions. Importantly, their tuning was unaffected when the butterflies changed their heading after compass perturbations, showing that these neurons specifically encode the goal direction. Overall, we here discovered invertebrate goal-direction neurons that share functional similarities to goal-direction cells reported in mammals. Our results give insights into the evolutionarily conserved principles of goal-directed spatial orientation in animals.
Abstract reproduced from the published paper, which is licensed CC BY. Copyright remains with the authors.
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