ReviewThe Journal of physiology2017
How a fly photoreceptor samples light information in time.
Review in The Journal of physiology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Flight in the dark: different responses to darkness in flying insects.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Synaptic high-frequency jumping synchronises vision to high-speed behaviour.Nature communications · 2026Article
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- High-speed imaging of light-induced photoreceptor microsaccades in compound eyes.Communications biology · 2022Article
- CaThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Image statistics of the environment surrounding freely behaving hoverflies.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2019Article
- Effects of phase correlations in naturalistic stimuli on quantitative information coding by fly photoreceptors.Journal of neurophysiology · 2018Article
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- A biomimetic fly photoreceptor model elucidates how stochastic adaptive quantal sampling provides a large dynamic range.The Journal of physiology · 2017Review
- Shining new light into the workings of photoreceptors and visual interneurons.The Journal of physiology · 2017Article
- Modeling elucidates how refractory period can provide profound nonlinear gain control to graded potential neurons.Physiological reports · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A photoreceptor's information capture is constrained by the structure and function of its light-sensitive parts. Specifically, in a fly photoreceptor, this limit is set by the number of its photon sampling units (microvilli), constituting its light sensor (the rhabdomere), and the speed and recoverability of their phototransduction reactions. In this review, using an insightful constructionist viewpoint of a fly photoreceptor being an 'imperfect' photon counting machine, we explain how these constraints give rise to adaptive quantal information sampling in time, which maximises information in responses to salient light changes while antialiasing visual signals. Interestingly, such sampling innately determines also why photoreceptors extract more information, and more economically, from naturalistic light contrast changes than Gaussian white-noise stimuli, and we explicate why this is so. Our main message is that stochasticity in quantal information sampling is less noise and more processing, representing an 'evolutionary adaptation' to generate a reliable neural estimate of the variable world.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.