Topic: monosynaptic connections

Organisms continually tune their perceptual systems to the features they encounter in their environment. We have studied how this experience reorganizes the synaptic connectivity of neurons in the olfactory (piriform) cortex of the mouse. We developed an approach to measure synaptic connectivity in vivo, training a deep convolutional network to reliably identify monosynaptic connections from the spike-time cross-correlograms of 4.4 million single-unit pairs. This revealed that excitatory piriform neurons that respond similarly to each other are more likely to be connected. We asked whether thi

Sleep is a crucial part of everyday life, but the neural networks that regulate behavioural manifestations of sleep are not fully understood. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, dorsal fan-shaped body neurons (dFBNs) sit at the centre of homeostatic sleep control: the neurons’ excitability increases with sleep drive, and their artificial activation induces sleep. Despite significant advances in understanding of the molecular events that regulate the activity of dFBNs, insight into how they impose sleep on the organism is still lagging. By combining optogenetics and in vivo patch-clamp re