A neural circuit for wind-guided olfactory navigation

Andrew M. M. Matheson, Aaron J. Lanz, Ashley M. Medina, Al M. Licata, Timothy A. Currier, Mubarak H. Syed and Katherine I. Nagel ()
Additional contact information
Andrew M. M. Matheson: Neuroscience Institute, NYU Medical Center
Aaron J. Lanz: Neuroscience Institute, NYU Medical Center
Ashley M. Medina: Neuroscience Institute, NYU Medical Center
Al M. Licata: Neuroscience Institute, NYU Medical Center
Timothy A. Currier: Neuroscience Institute, NYU Medical Center
Mubarak H. Syed: University of New Mexico
Katherine I. Nagel: Neuroscience Institute, NYU Medical Center

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: Abstract To navigate towards a food source, animals frequently combine odor cues about source identity with wind direction cues about source location. Where and how these two cues are integrated to support navigation is unclear. Here we describe a pathway to the Drosophila fan-shaped body that encodes attractive odor and promotes upwind navigation. We show that neurons throughout this pathway encode odor, but not wind direction. Using connectomics, we identify fan-shaped body local neurons called h∆C that receive input from this odor pathway and a previously described wind pathway. We show that h∆C neurons exhibit odor-gated, wind direction-tuned activity, that sparse activation of h∆C neurons promotes navigation in a reproducible direction, and that h∆C activity is required for persistent upwind orientation during odor. Based on connectome data, we develop a computational model showing how h∆C activity can promote navigation towards a goal such as an upwind odor source. Our results suggest that odor and wind cues are processed by separate pathways and integrated within the fan-shaped body to support goal-directed navigation.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32247-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-32247-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32247-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().