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14 Janelia Publications

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    Svoboda Lab
    03/17/22 | A midbrain-thalamus-cortex circuit reorganizes cortical dynamics to initiate movement.
    Inagaki HK, Chen S, Ridder MC, Sah P, Li N, Yang Z, Hasanbegovic H, Gao Z, Gerfen CR, Svoboda K
    Cell. 2022 Mar 17;185(8):1065. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.02.006

    Motor behaviors are often planned long before execution but only released after specific sensory events. Planning and execution are each associated with distinct patterns of motor cortex activity. Key questions are how these dynamic activity patterns are generated and how they relate to behavior. Here, we investigate the multi-regional neural circuits that link an auditory "Go cue" and the transition from planning to execution of directional licking. Ascending glutamatergic neurons in the midbrain reticular and pedunculopontine nuclei show short latency and phasic changes in spike rate that are selective for the Go cue. This signal is transmitted via the thalamus to the motor cortex, where it triggers a rapid reorganization of motor cortex state from planning-related activity to a motor command, which in turn drives appropriate movement. Our studies show how midbrain can control cortical dynamics via the thalamus for rapid and precise motor behavior.

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    03/31/22 | A natural timeless polymorphism allowing circadian clock synchronization in "white nights".
    Lamaze A, Chen C, Leleux S, Xu M, George R, Stanewsky R
    Nature Communications. 2022 Mar 31;13(1):1724. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29293-6

    Daily temporal organisation offers a fitness advantage and is determined by an interplay between environmental rhythms and circadian clocks. While light:dark cycles robustly synchronise circadian clocks, it is not clear how animals experiencing only weak environmental cues deal with this problem. Like humans, Drosophila originate in sub-Saharan Africa and spread North up to the polar circle, experiencing long summer days or even constant light (LL). LL disrupts clock function, due to constant activation of CRYPTOCHROME, which induces degradation of the clock protein TIMELESS (TIM), but temperature cycles are able to overcome these deleterious effects of LL. We show here that for this to occur a recently evolved natural timeless allele (ls-tim) is required, encoding the less light-sensitive L-TIM in addition to S-TIM, the only form encoded by the ancient s-tim allele. We show that only ls-tim flies can synchronise their behaviour to semi-natural conditions typical for Northern European summers, suggesting that this functional gain is driving the Northward ls-tim spread.

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    03/14/22 | A population of descending neurons that regulates the flight motor of Drosophila.
    Namiki S, Ros IG, Morrow C, Rowell WJ, Card GM, Korff W, Dickinson MH
    Current Biology. 2022 Mar 14;32(5):1189-1196. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.008

    Similar to many insect species, Drosophila melanogaster is capable of maintaining a stable flight trajectory for periods lasting up to several hours. Because aerodynamic torque is roughly proportional to the fifth power of wing length, even small asymmetries in wing size require the maintenance of subtle bilateral differences in flapping motion to maintain a stable path. Flies can even fly straight after losing half of a wing, a feat they accomplish via very large, sustained kinematic changes to both the damaged and intact wings. Thus, the neural network responsible for stable flight must be capable of sustaining fine-scaled control over wing motion across a large dynamic range. In this study, we describe an unusual type of descending neuron (DNg02) that projects directly from visual output regions of the brain to the dorsal flight neuropil of the ventral nerve cord. Unlike many descending neurons, which exist as single bilateral pairs with unique morphology, there is a population of at least 15 DNg02 cell pairs with nearly identical shape. By optogenetically activating different numbers of DNg02 cells, we demonstrate that these neurons regulate wingbeat amplitude over a wide dynamic range via a population code. Using two-photon functional imaging, we show that DNg02 cells are responsive to visual motion during flight in a manner that would make them well suited to continuously regulate bilateral changes in wing kinematics. Collectively, we have identified a critical set of descending neurons that provides the sensitivity and dynamic range required for flight control.

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    09/28/21 | Connectome-constrained Latent Variable Model of Whole-Brain Neural Activity
    Lu Mi , Richard Xu , Sridhama Prakhya , Albert Lin , Nir Shavit , Aravinthan Samuel , Srinivas C Turaga
    International Conference on Learning Representations. 09/2021:

    The availability of both anatomical connectivity and brain-wide neural activity measurements in C. elegans make the worm a promising system for learning detailed, mechanistic models of an entire nervous system in a data-driven way. However, one faces several challenges when constructing such a model. We often do not have direct experimental access to important modeling details such as single-neuron dynamics and the signs and strengths of the synaptic connectivity. Further, neural activity can only be measured in a subset of neurons, often indirectly via calcium imaging, and significant trial-to-trial variability has been observed. To address these challenges, we introduce a connectome-constrained latent variable model (CC-LVM) of the unobserved voltage dynamics of the entire C. elegans nervous system and the observed calcium signals. We used the framework of variational autoencoders to fit parameters of the mechanistic simulation constituting the generative model of the LVM to calcium imaging observations. A variational approximate posterior distribution over latent voltage traces for all neurons is efficiently inferred using an inference network, and constrained by a prior distribution given by the biophysical simulation of neural dynamics. We applied this model to an experimental whole-brain dataset, and found that connectomic constraints enable our LVM to predict the activity of neurons whose activity were withheld significantly better than models unconstrained by a connectome. We explored models with different degrees of biophysical detail, and found that models with realistic conductance-based synapses provide markedly better predictions than current-based synapses for this system.

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    Card Lab
    03/11/22 | Context-dependent control of behavior in Drosophila.
    Oram TB, Card GM
    Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 2022 Mar 11;73:102523. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2022.02.003

    The representation of contextual information peripheral to a salient stimulus is central to an animal's ability to correctly interpret and flexibly respond to that stimulus. While the computations and circuits underlying the context-dependent modulation of stimulus-response pairings have typically been studied in vertebrates, the genetic tractability, numeric simplification, and well-characterized connectivity patterns of the Drosophila melanogaster brain have facilitated circuit-level insights into contextual processing. Recent studies in flies reveal the neuronal mechanisms that create flexible context-dependent behavioral responses to sensory events in conditions of predation threat, feeding regulation, and social interaction.

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    03/11/22 | Motor cortical output for skilled forelimb movement is selectively distributed across projection neuron classes.
    Park J, Phillips JW, Guo J, Martin KA, Hantman AW, Dudman JT
    Science Advances. 2022 Mar 11;8(10):eabj5167. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj5167

    The interaction of descending neocortical outputs and subcortical premotor circuits is critical for shaping skilled movements. Two broad classes of motor cortical output projection neurons provide input to many subcortical motor areas: pyramidal tract (PT) neurons, which project throughout the neuraxis, and intratelencephalic (IT) neurons, which project within the cortex and subcortical striatum. It is unclear whether these classes are functionally in series or whether each class carries distinct components of descending motor control signals. Here, we combine large-scale neural recordings across all layers of motor cortex with cell type-specific perturbations to study cortically dependent mouse motor behaviors: kinematically variable manipulation of a joystick and a kinematically precise reach-to-grasp. We find that striatum-projecting IT neuron activity preferentially represents amplitude, whereas pons-projecting PT neurons preferentially represent the variable direction of forelimb movements. Thus, separable components of descending motor cortical commands are distributed across motor cortical projection cell classes.

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    03/15/22 | Myosin VI regulates the spatial organisation of mammalian transcription initiation.
    Hari-Gupta Y, Fili N, Dos Santos Á, Cook AW, Gough RE, Reed HC, Wang L, Aaron J, Venit T, Wait E, Grosse-Berkenbusch A, Gebhardt JC, Percipalle P, Chew T, Martin-Fernandez M, Toseland CP
    Nature Communications. 2022 Mar 15;13(1):1346. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-28962-w

    During transcription, RNA Polymerase II (RNAPII) is spatially organised within the nucleus into clusters that correlate with transcription activity. While this is a hallmark of genome regulation in mammalian cells, the mechanisms concerning the assembly, organisation and stability remain unknown. Here, we have used combination of single molecule imaging and genomic approaches to explore the role of nuclear myosin VI (MVI) in the nanoscale organisation of RNAPII. We reveal that MVI in the nucleus acts as the molecular anchor that holds RNAPII in high density clusters. Perturbation of MVI leads to the disruption of RNAPII localisation, chromatin organisation and subsequently a decrease in gene expression. Overall, we uncover the fundamental role of MVI in the spatial regulation of gene expression.

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    03/07/22 | Neuromuscular embodiment of feedback control elements in Drosophila flight
    Samuel C. Whitehead , Sofia Leone , Theodore Lindsay , Matthew Meiselman , Noah Cowan , Michael Dickinson , Nilay Yapici , David Stern , Troy Shirangi , Itai Cohen
    bioRxiv. 2022 Mar 07:. doi: 10.1101/2022.02.22.481344

    While insects like Drosophila are flying, aerodynamic instabilities require that they make millisecond-timescale adjustments to their wing motion to stay aloft and on course. These stabilization reflexes can be modeled as a proportional-integral (PI) controller; however, it is unclear how such control might be instantiated in insects at the level of muscles and neurons. Here, we show that the b1 and b2 motor units—prominent components of the fly’s steering muscles system—modulate specific elements of the PI controller: the angular displacement (integral, I) and angular velocity (proportional, P), respectively. Moreover, these effects are observed only during the stabilization of pitch. Our results provide evidence for an organizational principle in which each muscle contributes to a specific functional role in flight control, a finding that highlights the power of using top-down behavioral modeling to guide bottom-up cellular manipulation studies.

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    03/27/22 | Petascale pipeline for precise alignment of images from serial section electron microscopy.
    Sergiy Popovych , Thomas Macrina , Nico Kemnitz , Manuel Castro , Barak Nehoran , Zhen Jia , J. Alexander Bae , Eric Mitchell , Shang Mu , Eric T. Trautman , Stephan Saalfeld , Kai Li , Sebastian Seung
    bioRxiv. 2022 Mar 27:. doi: 10.1101/2022.03.25.485816

    The reconstruction of neural circuits from serial section electron microscopy (ssEM) images is being accelerated by automatic image segmentation methods. Segmentation accuracy is often limited by the preceding step of aligning 2D section images to create a 3D image stack. Precise and robust alignment in the presence of image artifacts is challenging, especially as datasets are attaining the petascale. We present a computational pipeline for aligning ssEM images with several key elements. Self-supervised convolutional nets are trained via metric learning to encode and align image pairs, and they are used to initialize iterative fine-tuning of alignment. A procedure called vector voting increases robustness to image artifacts or missing image data. For speedup the series is divided into blocks that are distributed to computational workers for alignment. The blocks are aligned to each other by composing transformations with decay, which achieves a global alignment without resorting to a time-consuming global optimization. We apply our pipeline to a whole fly brain dataset, and show improved accuracy relative to prior state of the art. We also demonstrate that our pipeline scales to a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex. Our pipeline is publicly available through two open source Python packages.

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    03/09/22 | Regulation of liver subcellular architecture controls metabolic homeostasis.
    Parlakgül G, Arruda AP, Pang S, Cagampan E, Min N, Güney E, Lee GY, Inouye K, Hess HF, Xu CS, Hotamışlıgil GS
    Nature. 2022 Mar 09;603(7902):736-742. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04488-5

    Cells display complex intracellular organization by compartmentalization of metabolic processes into organelles, yet the resolution of these structures in the native tissue context and their functional consequences are not well understood. Here we resolved the three-dimensional structural organization of organelles in large (more than 2.8 × 10 µm) volumes of intact liver tissue (15 partial or full hepatocytes per condition) at high resolution (8 nm isotropic pixel size) using enhanced focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy imaging followed by deep-learning-based automated image segmentation and 3D reconstruction. We also performed a comparative analysis of subcellular structures in liver tissue of lean and obese mice and found substantial alterations, particularly in hepatic endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which undergoes massive structural reorganization characterized by marked disorganization of stacks of ER sheets and predominance of ER tubules. Finally, we demonstrated the functional importance of these structural changes by monitoring the effects of experimental recovery of the subcellular organization on cellular and systemic metabolism. We conclude that the hepatic subcellular organization of the ER architecture are highly dynamic, integrated with the metabolic state and critical for adaptive homeostasis and tissue health.

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