Ultrafast (400 Hz) network oscillations induced in mouse barrel cortex by optogenetic activation of thalamocortical axons
Abstract
Oscillations of extracellular voltage, reflecting synchronous, rhythmic activity in large populations of neurons, are a ubiquitous feature in the mammalian brain and are thought to subserve important, if not fully understood cognitive functions. Oscillations at different frequency bands are hallmarks of specific brain and behavioral states. At the higher end of the spectrum, ultrafast (400-600 Hz) oscillations in the somatosensory cortex, in response to peripheral nerve stimulation or punctate sensory stimuli, were previously observed in humans and in a handful of animal studies; however, their synaptic basis and functional significance remain largely unexplored. Here we report that brief optogenetic activation of thalamocortical axons, in brain slices from mouse somatosensory (barrel) cortex, elicited in the thalamorecipient layer local field potential (LFP) oscillations which we dubbed 'ripplets', consisting of a sequence of precisely reproducible 2-5 negative transients at ~400 Hz which originated in the postsynaptic cortical network. Fast-spiking (FS) inhibitory interneurons fired ~400 Hz spike bursts entrained to the LFP oscillation, while regular-spiking (RS) excitatory neurons typically fired only 1-2 spikes per ripplet, preceding FS spikes by ~1.5 ms. Spike bursts were exquisitely synchronized between neighboring FS cells, while RS cells received synchronous, precisely repeating sequences of alternating excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic currents (E/IPSCs) phase-locked to the LFP oscillation. Spikes in FS cells followed at short (~0.4 ms) latency onset of EPSCs and preceded (by ~0.8 ms) onset of IPSCs in simultaneously recorded RS cells, suggesting that FS cells were driven to fire by phasic inputs from excitatory cells, and in turn evoked volleys of inhibition which enforced synchrony on excitatory cells. We suggest that ripplets are an intrinsically generated cortical response to a strong, synchronous thalamocortical volley. Ripplets and the associated spike sequences in excitatory cells could provide increased bandwidth for encoding and transmitting sensory information. In addition, optogenetically induced ripplets are a uniquely accessible model system for studying synaptic mechanisms of fast and ultrafast cortical and hippocampal oscillations.
Data availability
Figure 1- Source Data 1 contains the cell count data used for Figure 1 - Figure Supplement 1;Figure 2- Source Data 1 contains the electrophysiological parameters data used for Figure 2 - Figure Supplement 1;Code used to calculate synchrony indices has been deposited to GitHub.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (NS116604)
- Ariel Agmon
National Institutes of Health (Predoctoral Training Grants GM081741 and GM132494)
- Rachel E Hostetler
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Animals used in this study were housed at the AAALAC-accredited WVU Lab Animal Research Facility according to institutional, federal and AAALAC guidelines. Animal use followed the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and was approved by the WVU Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (protocol #1604002316). West Virginia University has a PHS-approved Animal Welfare Assurance D16-00362 (A3597-01).
Copyright
© 2023, Hu 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.
Metrics
-
- 1,586
- views
-
- 141
- downloads
-
- 6
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Cerebellar dysfunction leads to postural instability. Recent work in freely moving rodents has transformed investigations of cerebellar contributions to posture. However, the combined complexity of terrestrial locomotion and the rodent cerebellum motivate new approaches to perturb cerebellar function in simpler vertebrates. Here, we adapted a validated chemogenetic tool (TRPV1/capsaicin) to describe the role of Purkinje cells — the output neurons of the cerebellar cortex — as larval zebrafish swam freely in depth. We achieved both bidirectional control (activation and ablation) of Purkinje cells while performing quantitative high-throughput assessment of posture and locomotion. Activation modified postural control in the pitch (nose-up/nose-down) axis. Similarly, ablations disrupted pitch-axis posture and fin-body coordination responsible for climbs. Postural disruption was more widespread in older larvae, offering a window into emergent roles for the developing cerebellum in the control of posture. Finally, we found that activity in Purkinje cells could individually and collectively encode tilt direction, a key feature of postural control neurons. Our findings delineate an expected role for the cerebellum in postural control and vestibular sensation in larval zebrafish, establishing the validity of TRPV1/capsaicin-mediated perturbations in a simple, genetically tractable vertebrate. Moreover, by comparing the contributions of Purkinje cell ablations to posture in time, we uncover signatures of emerging cerebellar control of posture across early development. This work takes a major step towards understanding an ancestral role of the cerebellum in regulating postural maturation.
-
- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.