Evidence that histamine is the inhibitory transmitter of the auditory interneuron ON1 of crickets.

The omega neurons of crickets are connected with each other by reciprocal inhibition. This inhibition could be mimicked by bath-applied histamine and blocked by histamine H1-antagonists. Histamine, like ON1, also influenced the ascending interneuron AN2, so that its response pattern more closely reflected the temporal structure of the calling song. This evidence strongly suggests that histamine is the inhibitory transmitter of the ON1s.