State-dependent activity dynamics of hypothalamic stress effector neurons
- Western University, Canada
Abstract
The stress response necessitates an immediate boost in vital physiological functions from their homeostatic operation to elevated emergency response. However, neural mechanisms underlying this state-dependent change remain largely unknown. Using a combination of in vivo and ex vivo electrophysiology with computational modeling, we report that corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) neurons in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN), the effector neurons of hormonal stress response, rapidly transition between distinct activity states through recurrent inhibition. Specifically, in vivo optrode recording shows that under non-stress conditions, CRHPVN neurons often fire with rhythmic brief bursts (RB), which, somewhat counterintuitively, constrains firing rate due to long (~2 s) inter-burst intervals. Stressful stimuli rapidly switch RB to continuous single spiking (SS), permitting a large increase in firing rate. A spiking network model shows that recurrent inhibition can control this activity-state switch, and more broadly the gain of spiking responses to excitatory inputs. In biological CRHPVN neurons ex vivo, the injection of whole-cell currents derived from our computational model recreates the in vivo-like switch between RB and SS, providing a direct evidence that physiologically relevant network inputs enable state-dependent computation in single neurons. Together, we present a novel mechanism for state-dependent activity dynamics in CRHPVN neurons.
Data availability
All data analyzed in this study are included in the manuscript, figures, and figure-supplement. Data analysis code and source code for figures is available at https://github.com/smestern/ichiyama_2022_code. The full list of model parameters are listed in Table 1. Figure source data files contain the numerical data used to generate figures.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2015-06106)
- Wataru Inoue
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (PJT-148707)
- Wataru Inoue
Canada First Research Excellence Fund (BrainsCAN Accelerator)
- Wataru Inoue
Canada First Research Excellence Fund (BrainsCAN Accelerator)
- Lyle Muller
Compute Canada
- Lyle Muller
Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform
- Samuel Mestern
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were performed in accordance with the Canadian Council on Animal Care guidelines and approved by the University of Western Ontario Animal Use Subcommittee (AUP: 2018-130)
Copyright
© 2022, Ichiyama et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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State-dependent activity dynamics of hypothalamic stress effector neurons
eLife 11:e76832.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.76832
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