Sensory processing articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    A female Drosophila melanogaster pheromone is recognized by males from both the same and a closely related species through conserved peripheral sensory neurons; the signal is then differentially propagated to promote conspecific and suppress interspecies courtship.

    • Laura F. Seeholzer
    • , Max Seppo
    •  & Vanessa Ruta

  • Letter |

    The identity and hedonic value of tastes are encoded in distinct neural substrates; in mice, the amygdala is necessary and sufficient to drive valence-specific behaviours in response to bitter or sweet taste stimuli, and the cortex can independently represent taste identity.

    • Li Wang
    • , Sarah Gillis-Smith
    •  & Charles S. Zuker

  • Article |

    Tracing of projection neuron axons from the primary visual cortex to their targets shows that these neurons often project to multiple cortical areas of the mouse brain.

    • Yunyun Han
    • , Justus M. Kebschull
    •  & Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel

  • Letter |

    The discovery of a visual-looming-sensitive neuron, LPLC2, that provides input to the Drosophila escape pathway, and uses dendrites patterned to integrate directionally selective inputs to selectively encode outward motion.

    • Nathan C. Klapoetke
    • , Aljoscha Nern
    •  & Gwyneth M. Card

  • Letter |

    Mapping the organization of excitatory inputs onto the dendritic spines of individual mouse visual cortex neurons reveals how inputs representing features from the extended visual scene are organized and establishes a computational unit suited to amplify contours and elongated edges.

    • M. Florencia Iacaruso
    • , Ioana T. Gasler
    •  & Sonja B. Hofer

  • Article |

    A combination of microprism-based cellular imaging to monitor insular cortex visual cue responses in behaving mice across hunger states with circuit mapping and manipulations reveals a neural basis for state-specific biased processing of motivationally relevant cues.

    • Yoav Livneh
    • , Rohan N. Ramesh
    •  & Mark L. Andermann

  • Article |

    Global mapping shows that mouse retinal neurons prefer visual motion produced when the animal moves along two behaviourally relevant axes, allowing the encoding of the animal’s every translation and rotation.

    • Shai Sabbah
    • , John A. Gemmer
    •  & David M. Berson

  • Article |

    The functional diversity of bipolar cells, which split visual inputs into different excitatory channels within the retina, arises from centre–surround interactions in their receptive fields that tune both spatial and temporal signalling.

    • Katrin Franke
    • , Philipp Berens
    •  & Tom Baden

  • Letter |

    In the neocortex, sensory information flows into areas specific for a particular modality through parallel thalamocortical circuits, consisting of first order and higher order nuclei connecting to primary and secondary cortical areas, respectively; here, the authors identify common developmental genetic programs that organize these conserved features in parallel sensory pathways.

    • Laura Frangeul
    • , Gabrielle Pouchelon
    •  & Denis Jabaudon

  • Letter |

    Functional imaging techniques use changes in blood flow to infer neural activity, but how strongly the two are correlated is a subject of debate; here, vascular and neural responses to a range of visual stimuli are imaged in cat and rat primary visual cortex, revealing that vascular signals are partially decoupled from local neural signals.

    • Philip O’Herron
    • , Pratik Y. Chhatbar
    •  & Prakash Kara

  • Article |

    Recordings from cat visual cortex show that the cortical maps for stimulus orientation, direction and retinal disparity depend on an organization in which thalamic axons with similar retinotopy and light/dark responses are clustered together in the cortex.

    • Jens Kremkow
    • , Jianzhong Jin
    •  & Jose M. Alonso

  • Letter |

    Colour vision is thought to rely on the comparison of signals from cone cells in the retina, this paper identifies a class of mouse retinal ganglion cells (J-RGC) that integrates an OFF signal from ultraviolet-sensitive cones with an ON signal from green-sensitive rods, producing a colour-opponent channel that may enable animals to detect urine territory marks; the underlying circuit may also explain why humans experience a blue shift in night-time vision.

    • Maximilian Joesch
    •  & Markus Meister

  • Letter |

    Two-photon calcium imaging and electron microscopy were used to explore the relationship between structure and function in mouse primary visual cortex, showing that layer 2/3 neurons are connected in subnetworks, that pyramidal neurons with similar orientation selectivity preferentially form synapses with each other, and that neurons with similar orientation tuning form larger synapses; this study exemplifies functional connectomics as a powerful method for studying the organizational logic of cortical networks.

    • Wei-Chung Allen Lee
    • , Vincent Bonin
    •  & R. Clay Reid

  • Article |

    Two-photon calcium imaging reveals that the mouse retina contains more than 30 functionally distinct retinal ganglion cells, including some that have not been described before, exceeding current estimates and suggesting that the functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells may be much larger than previously thought.

    • Tom Baden
    • , Philipp Berens
    •  & Thomas Euler

  • Letter |

    Activation of the sweet and bitter cortical fields in awake mice evokes predetermined behavioural programs, independent of learning and experience, illustrating the hardwired and innate nature of the sense of taste.

    • Yueqing Peng
    • , Sarah Gillis-Smith
    •  & Charles S. Zuker

  • Letter |

    A Drosophila chemosensory receptor, expressed in leg sensory neurons, is necessary for behavioural and molecular synchronization of the fly’s circadian clock to low-amplitude temperature cycles; this temperature-sensing pathway functions independently from the known temperature sensors of the fly’s antennae.

    • Chenghao Chen
    • , Edgar Buhl
    •  & Ralf Stanewsky

  • Letter |

    Neuronal representations of sensory stimuli tend to become sparse and decorrelated, with different odours giving rise to fewer neuronal spikes in rare neurons, as signal processing moves up to higher brain layers; here comprehensive recording from the Drosophila olfactory processing centre finds instead some highly correlated tuning curves that vary flexibly from animal to animal.

    • Toshihide Hige
    • , Yoshinori Aso
    •  & Glenn C. Turner

  • Letter |

    The mechanisms of thermosensing in the Drosophila brain are elucidated by the identification of distinct classes of projection neurons which are excited either by external cooling or warming, or both; the neurons that are excited by warming participate in complex circuits that incorporate crossover inhibition from cool receptor neurons.

    • Wendy W. Liu
    • , Ofer Mazor
    •  & Rachel I. Wilson

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