Unexpected diversity in the motor control of rapid eye movements

Charlie’s fantastic paper on the circuits that control hunting and exploratory saccades is now published in Current Biology: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.010

In our previous paper (10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.008) we discovered that zebrafish use a special type of saccadic eye movement when they hunt, which led us to hypothesise that there might be a distinct neuronal circuit responsible for its control. In this paper, we find that specialised subsets of motoneurons in the oculomotor nucleus are active during different saccade types, and then trace the premotor pathways that are responsible for their behavioural context-specific recruitment. Remarkably, the Type Y motoneurons that are exclusively involved in hunting get direct monosynaptic input from the hunting command neurons in the pretectum that we discovered a few years ago (10.7554/eLife.48114)!

Also check out this nice dispatch about the work from Celine Bellegarda and David Schoppik: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.11.045