The early development and physiology of Xenopus laevis tadpole lateral line system

Xenopus laevis has a lateral line mechanosensory system throughout its full life cycle and a previous study on pre-feeding stage tadpoles revealed that it may play a role in motor responses to both water suction and water jets. Here, we investigated the physiology of the anterior lateral line system in newly hatched tadpoles and the motor outputs induced by its activation in response to brief suction stimuli. High-speed videoing showed tadpoles tended to turn and swim away when strong suction was applied close to the head. The lateral line neuromasts were revealed by using DASPEI staining, and their inactivation with neomycin eliminated tadpole motor responses to suction. In immobilised preparations, suction or electrically stimulating the anterior lateral line nerve reliably initiated swimming but the motor nerve discharges implicating turning was observed only occasionally. The same stimulation applied during ongoing fictive swimming produced a halting response. The anterior lateral line nerve showed spontaneous afferent discharges at rest and increased activity during stimulation. Efferent activities were only recorded during tadpole fictive swimming and were largely synchronous with the ipsilateral motor nerve discharges. Finally, calcium imaging identified neurons with fluorescence increase time-locked with suction stimulation in the hindbrain and midbrain. A cluster of neurons at the entry point of the anterior lateral line nerve in the dorsolateral hindbrain had the shortest latency in their responses, supporting their potential sensory interneuron identity. Future studies need to reveal how the lateral line sensory information is processed by the central circuit to determine tadpole motor behaviour.

Mechanosensory Lateral Line Nerve Projections to Auditory Neurons in the Dorsal Descending Octaval Nucleus in the Goldfish, Carassius auratus

The nucleus medialis is the main first-order target of the mechanosensory lateral line (LL) system. This report definitively demonstrates that mechanosensory LL inputs also terminate in the ipsilateral dorsal portion of the descending octaval nucleus (dDO) in the goldfish. The dDO, which is the main first-order auditory nucleus in bony fishes, includes neurons that receive direct input from the otolithic end organs of the inner ear and project to the auditory midbrain. There are two groups of such auditory projection neurons: medial and lateral. The medial and the lateral groups in turn contain several neuronal populations, each of which includes one or more morphological cell types. In goldfish, the exclusively mechanosensory anterior and posterior LL nerves terminate only on specific cell types of auditory projection neurons in the lateral dDO group. Single neurons in the lateral dDO group may receive input from both anterior and posterior LL nerves. It is possible that some of the lateral dDO neurons that receive LL input also receive input from one or more of the otolithic end organs. These results are consistent with functional studies demonstrating low frequency acoustic sensitivity of the mechanosensory LL in teleosts, and they reveal that the anatomical substrate for sensory integration of otolithic and LL inputs is present at the origin of the central ascending auditory pathway in an otophysine fish.

Lateral-line activity during undulatory body motions suggests a feedback link in closed-loop control of sea lamprey swimming

The lateral-line system is common to most aquatic organisms. It plays an important role in behaviours involving detection of other animals and obstacles. In gnathostome fishes, these behaviours appear to be dependent on an efferent inhibitory system that filters out stimuli caused by the animal’s own movement. Sea lampreys ( Petromyzon marinus L., 1758), the most basal extant vertebrate, possess a functional lateral-line system. Yet they completely lack the inhibitory efferent system. Thus, they may use the lateral line to sense their own swimming movements, helping to stabilize swimming. To test this hypothesis, we first investigated the kinematics of free-swimming lampreys. In an intact tethered preparation, we then generated undualatory body motions of comparable amplitude and frequency to swimming, while monitoring the evoked responses of the posterior lateral-line nerve. Last, we tested the effect of eliminating lateral-line inputs by cobalt treatment. In the tethered preparation, we recorded distinctive and consistent activity in the lateral-line nerve that was strongly dependent on characteristics of the motion. We found that distinct characteristics of the rhythmic movements are encoded in the temporal characteristics of the response. Swimming kinematics of cobalt-treated animals differed from controls, suggesting a complex, yet necessary role of the lateral-line system in closed-loop control of swimming.