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A Circuit Encoding Absolute Cold Temperature in Drosophila
- Source :
- Curr Biol
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Elsevier BV, 2020.
-
Abstract
- Summary Animals react to environmental changes over timescales ranging from seconds to days and weeks. An important question is how sensory stimuli are parsed into neural signals operating over such diverse temporal scales. Here, we uncover a specialized circuit, from sensory neurons to higher brain centers, that processes information about long-lasting, absolute cold temperature in Drosophila. We identify second-order thermosensory projection neurons (TPN-IIs) exhibiting sustained firing that scales with absolute temperature. Strikingly, this activity only appears below the species-specific, preferred temperature for D. melanogaster (∼25°C). We trace the inputs and outputs of TPN-IIs and find that they are embedded in a cold “thermometer” circuit that provides powerful and persistent inhibition to brain centers involved in regulating sleep and activity. Our results demonstrate that the fly nervous system selectively encodes and relays absolute temperature information and illustrate a sensory mechanism that allows animals to adapt behavior specifically to cold conditions on the timescale of hours to days.
- Subjects :
- 0301 basic medicine
Nervous system
Sensory Receptor Cells
Sensory mechanism
Brain
Sensory system
Motor Activity
Biology
Article
General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
Cold Temperature
03 medical and health sciences
Drosophila melanogaster
030104 developmental biology
0302 clinical medicine
medicine.anatomical_structure
Encoding (memory)
medicine
Animals
Thermosensing
Sleep
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
Neuroscience
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 09609822
- Volume :
- 30
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Current Biology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....065ae94907deea0f488d3a358360fc97