Recurrent Circuitry Sustains Drosophila Courtship Drive While Priming Itself for Satiety

Abstract

Highlights d Copulation reporting neurons in male Drosophila detect matings and induce satiety d A recurrent excitation loop promotes recovery from satiety over days d Loop activity uses CREB to transcribe the inhibitory channel subunit TASK7 d Prior motivation generates the inhibitory environment that sustains satiety

The Neural Basis for a Persistent Internal State inDrosophilaFemales

“…5G-I). We did not observe persistent activity in any other Dsx-expressing cell types (Supp Fig. S4B-D), including the pCd1 cells, previously shown to be necessary for P1 induced persistent activity in males (Jung et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2019).…”

“…Our identification of a strongly recurrent circuit between pC1-Alpha and aIP-g neurons is in line with prior work connecting recurrent circuits to persistent activity. For example, recurrent networks in rats (Chen et al, 2017), fish (Aksay et al, 2007), and flies (Cognigni et al, 2018;Jung et al, 2020;Kim et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2018) contribute to persistent activity underlying short-term memory, although the precise mechanism, whether relying on intrinsic properties of individual neurons or on the connectivity within neural circuits, may vary across systems (Barak and Tsodyks, 2007;Major and Tank, 2004;Zylberberg and Strowbridge, 2017). While persistent activity was shown to outlast stimulation for minutes in slices or in isolated brains (e.g., (Egorov et al, 2002;Lyutova et al, 2019)), short-term or working memory related persistent activity in vivo typically lasts for seconds (Aksay et al, 2007), even when the delay period between stimulus presentation and behavior is variable (Park et al, 2019).…”

“…The specific timescales of persistency for these two behaviors scales with different overall levels of P1 activity. While P1 activation is sufficient for eliciting the persistent behavioral phenotypes, other groups of neurons are involved in maintaining the persistent state (Jung et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2019). Whether P1 neurons themselves are (Zhang et al, 2018) or are not active during the persistent period may depend on the details of the stimulation protocol.…”

Behavioral Evolution of Drosophila: Unraveling the Circuit Basis

“…Notably, olfactory inputs initiated at the Or67d-expressing neurons that are responsive to the inhibitory male pheromone cis-Vaccenyl acetate cVA [64] are similarly sent through parallel excitatory and inhibitory pathways to P1 [59]. In addition to the processed sensory inputs from pheromone receptor neurons, internal states affect P1 activities via excitatory dopaminergic [65] and inhibitory NPFergic modulatory signals [66,67]: dopamine attenuates mAL-mediated inhibition to elevate P1 activities [68].…”

Sex-specific speed-accuracy tradeoffs shape neural processing of acoustic signals in a grasshopper

“…Our model reveals that changes to the parameters of a common drift-diffusion threshold mechanism can replicate the behavior of both sexes. All model parameters map to biophysical properties of decision making neurons and circuits (Brody and Hanks, 2016;O'Connell et al, 2018): Sensory weights could correspond to the number and strength of synapses to an integrating neuron; The integration time constant could correspond for instance to the membrane time constant, the kinetics of intracellular calcium, or to factors that determine the dynamics of a recurrent network (Deutsch et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2019); The decision threshold could correspond to a spiking threshold determined by the density of sodium channels at the spike initiation zone or controlled by neuromodulators (Bargmann, 2012;Marder and Thirumalai, 2002;Zhang et al, 2019). Sexual selection can act on these parameters to produce the sex-specific integration of sensory information in grasshoppers.…”