2022BBSRC-NSF/BIO Generating New Network Analysis Tools for Elucidating the Functional Logic of 3D Vision Circuits of the Drosophila Brain

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Human eyes constantly exert small-scale motions called microsaccades. The functional role of microsaccades in perceiving the visual world remains a mystery. The lack of suitable tools and methodologies has limited our understanding of how animals see the 3-dimensional visual world and control their movements. The primate eyes and brain have hindered simultaneous live imaging of large-scale clusters of neurons at cellular resolution. Conversely, approaches using small-brain model organisms, such as the fruit fly (Drosophila) and zebrafish, have focussed on assigning motion detection and colour discrimination tasks to single neurons and circuits. Recently, it has been discovered that the photoreceptors in the retina of the fruit fly are also subject to light-induced and muscle-induced retinal movements such as microsaccades. It was shown in the fruit fly that light-induced microsaccades play a key role in depth perception of stereo vision. In this proposal, we aim to generate novel tools to elucidate how Drosophila brain circuits work dynamically at subcellular resolution in the biochemical domain. These tools integrate activity recordings in the living eye and biological brain circuits with graph analysis, multiscale modelling, active visual sampling, and connectomics/synaptomics models of computation. Building on this integration, we will investigate how active sampling in the retina supports Drosophila visual networks to encode 3-dimensional object information. Our novel multidisciplinary approach will generate new open-source software tools that will be invaluable for the neuroscience community exploring how stereoscopic perception of 3D objects emerges from the complex synaptic interactions of the eyes' and brain's visual circuits. Individually and collectively, these tools will potentially have broad impact well beyond the immediate goal of elucidating the functional logic of 3D vision circuits in the Drosophila.