Cell Reports . . . Wang Kun and others reveal the division of work in different visual brain regions of zebrafish.

Zebrafish (zebrafish) has become an important model organism in the field of visual function research due to its easy genetic transformation, transparent body, suitable for in vivo optical imaging and stable visual behavior (such as eye movement response OKR, visual motion response OMR and prey capture).the optic tectum and the anterior tectum are the main visual brain regions in zebrafish. They directly receive projections from the retina, and are mainly involved in many functions including motor perception, danger signal recognition and visual navigation.however, the differences and features of visual information feature extraction, coding and corresponding visual functions between the tectum and the anterior tectum are not clear.on January 14, 2020, Aristides B. arrenberg of University of t ü Bingen, Germany (with doctoral students Wang Kun and Julian Hinz as the first authors) published an article on cell reports, which revealed the division of different visual brain regions in zebrafish. Br / > the size of neurons in the parietal tectum of the zebrafish was measured by means of two-photon imaging, i.e., the size of neurons in the parietal tectum and the size of the neurons in the tectum of the juvenile zebra.several different types of receptive fields were found through experiments.among them, in the tectum of zebrafish, the receptive field of neurons is smaller, and most cells have inhibitory effect on the edge of receptive field.and the tectal neurons of these small receptive fields showed regular topological distribution.at the population level, these small receptive fields were not evenly distributed in the visual field of zebrafish, but were more dense in the front and upper part of the fish.according to previous reports, microplankton (such as Paramecium) in this area are more likely to induce juvenile zebrafish predation.in contrast, the visual receptive field of neurons in the anterior parietal tectum is very large, even covering the whole monocular visual field.the center of these visual receptive fields is more inclined to the field of view in the lower part.because neurons in the anterior parietal tectum of zebrafish are involved in the optokinetic response, the researchers believe that the visual information in the lower visual field may be more important in the visual response of zebrafish.therefore, the researchers designed an experiment to measure the "functional receptive field" of the visual motor response of zebrafish.consistent with the conjecture, the "functional receptive field" of optokinetic response was mainly concentrated in the temporal lower visual field.the "functional receptive field" of visual motor response was similar to the visual receptive field of neurons in the anterior parietal tectum.researchers believe that small areas of visual stimuli, such as microplankton, are mainly projected onto the zebrafish canopy.in contrast, a large range of visual stimuli, such as optical flow, are mainly received by the anterior tectum and encoded and induced visual motor transformation. this division of structure and function is more conducive to the small size zebrafish brain to efficiently use limited neurons to process visual information with different characteristics. original link: