@article {68274, title = {Biomechanical origins of proprioceptive maps in the Drosophila leg}, journal = {bioRxiv}, year = {2022}, month = {2022 Aug 09}, abstract = {

Proprioception, the sense of body position and movement, is essential for effective motor control. Because proprioceptive sensory neurons are embedded in complex and dynamic tissues, it has been challenging to understand how they sense and encode mechanical stimuli. Here, we find that proprioceptor neurons in the\ Drosophila\ femur are organized into functional groups that are biomechanically specialized to detect features of tibia joint kinematics. The dendrites of position and vibration-tuned proprioceptors receive distinct mechanical signals via the\ arculum, an elegant mechanical structure that decomposes movement of the tibia joint into orthogonal components. The cell bodies of position-tuned proprioceptors form a\ goniotopic\ map of joint angle, whereas the dendrites of vibration-tuned proprioceptors form a\ tonotopic\ map of tibia vibration frequency. Our findings reveal biomechanical mechanisms that underlie proprioceptor feature selectivity and identify common organizational principles between proprioception and other topographically organized sensory systems.

}, doi = {10.1101/2022.08.08.503192}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.08.08.503192}, author = {Akira Mamiya and Pralaksha Gurung and Igor Siwanowicz and Anne Sustar and Chenghao Chen and Jasper S. Phelps and Aaron T. Kuan and Alexandra Pacureanu and Wei-Chung Allen Lee and Natasha Mhatre and John C. Tuthill} }