{"doi":"10.7554/elife.77924","title":"Botulinum neurotoxin accurately separates tonic vs. phasic transmission and reveals heterosynaptic plasticity rules in Drosophila","abstract":"In developing and mature nervous systems, diverse neuronal subtypes innervate common targets to establish, maintain, and modify neural circuit function. A major challenge towards understanding the structural and functional architecture of neural circuits is to separate these inputs and determine their intrinsic and heterosynaptic relationships. The Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction is a powerful model system to study these questions, where two glutamatergic motor neurons, the strong phasic-like Is and weak tonic-like Ib, co-innervate individual muscle targets to coordinate locomotor behavior. However, complete neurotransmission from each input has never been electrophysiologically separated. We have employed a botulinum neurotoxin, BoNT-C, that eliminates both spontaneous and evoked neurotransmission without perturbing synaptic growth or structure, enabling the first approach that accurately isolates input-specific neurotransmission. Selective expression of BoNT-C in Is or Ib motor neurons disambiguates the functional properties of each input. Importantly, the blended values of Is+Ib neurotransmission can be fully recapitulated by isolated physiology from each input. Finally, selective silencing by BoNT-C does not induce heterosynaptic structural or functional plasticity at the convergent input. Thus, BoNT-C establishes the first approach to accurately separate neurotransmission between tonic vs. phasic neurons and defines heterosynaptic plasticity rules in a powerful model glutamatergic circuit.","journal":"eLife","year":2022,"id":242361,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":38,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9418,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":674188,"name":"Chun Chien","orcid":"0000-0003-0132-8457","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":382965,"name":"Pragya Goel","orcid":"0000-0002-6348-4909","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571611,"name":"Kaikai He","orcid":"0000-0003-2002-4862","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":444315,"name":"Cristian Pinales","orcid":"0000-0002-0826-5308","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":444316,"name":"Christopher Buser","orcid":"0000-0002-4379-3878","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":382968,"name":"Dion Dickman","orcid":"0000-0003-1884-284X","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":382966,"name":"Yifu Han","orcid":"0000-0002-1201-654X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":82,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:23:05.485568Z","pmid":"35993544","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}