Modeling apical and basal tree contribution to orientation selectivity in a mouse primary visual cortex layer 2/3 pyramidal cell
- FORTH Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Greece
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, United States
Abstract
Pyramidal neurons, a mainstay of cortical regions, receive a plethora of inputs from various areas onto their morphologically distinct apical and basal trees. Both trees differentially contribute to the somatic response, defining distinct anatomical and possibly functional sub-units. To elucidate the contribution of each tree to the encoding of visual stimuli at the somatic level, we modeled the response pattern of a mouse L2/3 V1 pyramidal neuron to orientation tuned synaptic input. Towards this goal, we used a morphologically detailed computational model of a single cell that replicates electrophysiological and two-photon imaging data. Our simulations predict a synergistic effect of apical and basal trees on somatic action potential generation: basal tree activity, in the form of either depolarization or dendritic spiking, is necessary for producing somatic activity, despite the fact that most somatic spikes are heavily driven by apical dendritic spikes. This model provides evidence for synergistic computations taking place in the basal and apical trees of the L2/3 V1 neuron along with mechanistic explanations for tree-specific contributions and emphasizes the potential role of predictive and attentional feedback input in these cells.
Data availability
The code and all data used/generated in the manuscript will be publicly available in a GitHub repository https://github.com/kepetousakis/petousakis_etal_2023.
Article and author information
Author details
Konstantinos-Evangelos Petousakis
Athanasia Papoutsi
Funding
ERC Starting Grant dEMORY (GA 311435)
- Panayiota Poirazi
H2020-MSCA ITN 2019, SmartNets (GA 860949)
- Panayiota Poirazi
Fondation Santé a FORTH-Synergy Grant (EVO-NMDA)
- Panayiota Poirazi
H2020-FETOPEN-2018-2019-2020-01NEUREKA (GA 863245)
- Panayiota Poirazi
NIH NEI (R01 grant EY-024019)
- Stelios Smirnakis
NINDS (R21 grant NS088457)
- Stelios Smirnakis
Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (PhD Scholarship (no. 6731))
- Konstantinos-Evangelos Petousakis
FORTH-Synergy Grant (FlexBe)
- Athanasia Papoutsi
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Petousakis 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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Modeling apical and basal tree contribution to orientation selectivity in a mouse primary visual cortex layer 2/3 pyramidal cell
eLife 12:e91627.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.91627
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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- 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.
