A coordinate transformation in the brain

Insects are incredibly skilled navigators. One problem that the brain of all navigating animals, including humans, must solve is to translate motor and sensory information into world-centred coordinates. For example, as you walk around a room, your brain is receiving information about your own movements and updating its estimate of your location within the room accordingly. It is unclear how such coordinate transformations happen. The relative simplicity of the nervous system of Drosophila and the precision tools available to address individual elements of that nervous system make Drosophila an ideal system for exploring this challenge. Here the authors unpack the neural circuit for such coordinate transformations in Drosophila.