, 2005). But finding individual neurons that respond particularly well to a moving fly is only part of the story: the fact that most neurons respond to a range of visual stimuli immediately tells us that the representation is more complex. An alternative view is that the important features

of a stimulus are represented by a “distributed code” in which information is contained in the pattern of activity across a population of neurons. In this second view, to really understand what the “frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain,” we must record the activity of all the neurons providing the retinal output. This is a formidable technical challenge: how do we sample activity across a complete population of Ruxolitinib ic50 sensory Ulixertinib concentration neurons? Markus Meister provided

the first approach by placing the retina of a salamander on an array of electrodes that recorded spikes from hundreds of ganglion cells simultaneously (Meister et al., 1995). In this issue of Neuron, Nikolaou et al. (2012) use imaging to achieve a similar goal, mapping the visual signal projected from the retina to the optic tectum of zebrafish. The optic tectum receives the major part of the retinal output—it is one of the largest parts of the brain by volume and analogous to the superior colliculus in mammals. In zebrafish, as in frogs, the tectum processes visual signals that drive motor outputs, contributing to behaviors such as avoidance of objects and predators as well as capture of prey (Nevin et al., 2010).

Although there may be “fly detectors” in the tectum, it clearly plays a more general role in directing the animal’s movements relative to its environment. Purely heuristic approaches will not, therefore, provide a proper understanding of the function of this part of the brain; we need to build a more complete and systematic picture of the information Rebamipide transmitted to the tectum and how this information is distributed—a “functional map” (Figure 1). To begin this mapping exercise, Nikolaou et al. (2012) made transgenic zebrafish expressing SyGCaMP3, a fluorescent protein that reports the activation of synapses by sensing the presynaptic calcium signal driving vesicle fusion. SyGCaMPs are a fusion of a genetically encoded calcium indicator of the GCaMP family to synaptophysin, a protein in the membrane of synaptic vesicles (Dreosti et al., 2009). By use of a promoter specific for retinal ganglion cells, Nikolaou et al. (2012) targeted SyGCaMP3 to all the axon terminals transmitting visual signals to the tectum. This approach is similar to one in which SyGCaMP2 was used to image the preceding stage of transmission of the visual signal, from bipolar cells to ganglion cells (Odermatt et al., 2012).