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A connectome of a learning and memory center in the adult Drosophila brain

2017; eLife Sciences Publications Ltd; Volume: 6; Linguagem: Inglês

10.7554/elife.26975

2050-084X

Shin-ya Takemura, Yoshinori Aso, Toshihide Hige, Allan M. Wong, Zhiyuan Lu, C. Shan Xu, Patricia K. Rivlin, Harald F. Hess, Ting Zhao, Toufiq Parag, Stuart Berg, Gary B. Huang, William Katz, Donald J. Olbris, Stephen M. Plaza, Lowell Umayam, Roxanne Aniceto, Lei-Ann Chang, Shirley A Lauchie, Omotara Ogundeyi, Christopher Ordish, Aya Shinomiya, Christopher Sigmund, Satoko Takemura, Julie Tran, Glenn Turner, Gerald M. Rubin, Louis K. Scheffer,

Physiological and biochemical adaptations

Understanding memory formation, storage and retrieval requires knowledge of the underlying neuronal circuits. In Drosophila, the mushroom body (MB) is the major site of associative learning. We reconstructed the morphologies and synaptic connections of all 983 neurons within the three functional units, or compartments, that compose the adult MB's α lobe, using a dataset of isotropic 8 nm voxels collected by focused ion-beam milling scanning electron microscopy. We found that Kenyon cells (KCs), whose sparse activity encodes sensory information, each make multiple en passant synapses to MB output neurons (MBONs) in each compartment. Some MBONs have inputs from all KCs, while others differentially sample sensory modalities. Only 6% of KC>MBON synapses receive a direct synapse from a dopaminergic neuron (DAN). We identified two unanticipated classes of synapses, KC>DAN and DAN>MBON. DAN activation produces a slow depolarization of the MBON in these DAN>MBON synapses and can weaken memory recall.