Specific neurons in fruit flies fire according to wind direction, helping them form a neural map of their surroundings. Algorithms inspired by this may be able to help robots to better navigate their environment.
Tatsuo Okubo at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues wanted to determine how wind direction was characterised by a fruit fly鈥檚 brain. While it is well known that wind direction affects the behaviour of insects, no one had yet developed a map of the neurons involved in this phenomenon for any animal.
The researchers were initially only looking for neurons that corresponded to antennae because they thought they would be the ones affected by wind. 鈥淲e then found these beautiful ring-shaped neurons that were next to neurons that affect the head direction,鈥� says Okubo.
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They recorded the firing rate of these ring neurons in a live fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as they changed the wind direction of its surroundings. The experiments were done in the dark to remove the impact of any visual stimuli.
The team found that different wind-sensitive neurons had different preferences for wind direction, firing more if the wind blew from their favoured direction. This led to a fluctuating firing pattern in the overall population of neurons that corresponded to wind direction.
Moreover, when these neurons were silenced, the fly鈥檚 head direction neurons responded as if there were no wind at all, suggesting that wind information directly influences the direction a fruit fly faces.
It is unclear whether humans also have such neurons. 鈥淗umans can definitely use wind for long-range navigation like pathfinding, but exactly how they sense it or how that feeds into a navigational circuit 鈥� it鈥檚 still an open question,鈥� says Okubo.
He also says these findings could one day be used to give robots an additional method of navigation. 鈥淚t could lead to a more robust navigation when visual cues are not available,鈥� says Okubo.
鈥淭his research proves that neurobiology still has a lot to learn from small but sophisticated insect brains,鈥� says Ronny Rosner at Newcastle University, UK. 鈥淭his will be particularly useful if we want to develop the most efficient algorithms for spatial orientation of intelligent machines.鈥�
Neuron
