Responses to visual motion stimuli of neurons from a crab assessed by multielectrode recording

MARIANO BELLUSCIO; ALEJANDRO CÁMERA; DANIEL TOMSIC

Congreso; XXXIII Congreso Anual Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias 2018; 2018

Oneof the main challenges in neuroscience nowadays is to understand theconcerted functioning of individual neurons dedicated to particularbehaviors in the behaving animal. This goal first requires to attainan adequate characterization of the behavior as well as anidentification of the key neuronal elements associated to thataction. Such conditions has been considerably attained for the escaperesponse to visual stimuli in the crab Neohelice. In fact, acombination of in vivo intracellular recording and staining, withbehavioral experiments and modeling, led us to postulate that amicrocircuit formed by four classes of identified lobula giant (LG)neurons operates as a decision making node for a number of importantvisually-guided components of the crab ́s escape behavior (1). Thesestudies, however, were done by recording LG neurons individually. Inorder to investigate the concerted functioning of the LG group, webegan to use multielectrode extracellular recordings. Here wedescribe the methodology and show results of simultaneously recordedresponses from different LG neurons to a variety of visual stimuli.The different LG classes can be distinguished by their electricalactivity and differential responses to visual stimuli. Simulataneousrecordings confirmed the rightfulness of previous interpretationsabout LG interactions assumed from independent intracellularrecordings. The current results establish the bases for and show thefeasibility of our next goal of recording the activity of LG neuronsin the behaving animal.p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 115%; }