Space–time wiring specificity supports direction selectivity in the retina
Open accessAbstract
How does the mammalian retina detect motion? This classic problem in visual neuroscience has remained unsolved for 50 years. In search of clues, here we reconstruct Off-type starburst amacrine cells (SACs) and bipolar cells (BCs) in serial electron microscopic images with help from EyeWire, an online community of 'citizen neuroscientists'. On the basis of quantitative analyses of contact area and branch depth in the retina, we find evidence that one BC type prefers to wire with a SAC dendrite near the SAC soma, whereas another BC type prefers to wire far from the soma. The near type is known to lag the far type in time of visual response. A mathematical model shows how such 'space-time wiring specificity' could endow SAC dendrites with receptive fields that are oriented in space-time and therefore respond selectively to stimuli that move in the outward direction from the soma.
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Only players who met a certain accuracy threshold, determined by their accuracy on a previously published retinal dataset, were allowed to reconstruct zebrafish neurons.
“only players who met a certain threshold (see below), determined by their accuracy on a previously published retinal dataset14,77, were allowed to reconstruct zebrafish neurons”
From Predicting modular functions and neural coding of behavior from a synaptic wiring diagram (2024) · cites this paper as [14]
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- Authors
- EyeWirers, T., Kim, J. S., Greene, M. J., Zlateski, A., Lee, K., Richardson, M., Turaga, S. C., Purcaro, M., Balkam, M., Robinson, A., Behabadi, B. F., Campos, M., Denk, W., & Seung, H. S.
- Affiliations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Qualcomm (United States) (US)
- Max Planck Society (DE)
- Max Planck Institute for Medical Research (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Seung, H. Sebastian
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2014-05
- Volume
- 509
- Issue
- 7500
- Pages
- 331-336
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- PMC
- PMC4074887
- OpenAlex
- W2040156859
- Cited by
- 450
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 31 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 50 · 2018: 48 · 2017: 49 · 2016: 58 · 2015: 38 · 2014: 23
- FWCI
- 28.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS076467)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Retinal Development and Disorders
- Keywords
- direction selectivity, motion detection, starburst amacrine cells, bipolar cells, retinal circuitry, citizen science, mouse retina, insect vision
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Artificial Intelligence, Brain Mapping, Dendrites, Models, Neurological, Motion, Neural Pathways, Retina, Presynaptic Terminals, Amacrine Cells, Retinal Bipolar Cells, Mice, Spatio-Temporal Analysis, Crowdsourcing
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