Position-independent functional refinement within the vagus motor topographic map

Abstract

Motor neurons in the central nervous system often lie in a continuous topographic map, where neurons that innervate different body parts are spatially intermingled. This is the case for the efferent neurons of the vagus nerve, which innervate diverse muscle and organ targets in the head and viscera for brain-body communication. It remains elusive how neighboring motor neurons with different fixed peripheral axon targets develop the separate somatodendritic (input) connectivity they need to generate spatially precise body control. Here we show that vagus motor neurons in the zebrafish indeed generate spatially appropriate peripheral responses to focal sensory stimulation even when they are transplanted into ectopic positions within the topographic map, indicating that circuit refinement occurs after the establishment of coarse topography. Refinement depends on motor neuron synaptic transmission, suggesting that an experience-dependent periphery-to-brain feedback mechanism establishes specific input connectivity amongst intermingled motor populations.