Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110, USA.
J Neurosci. 2012 Feb 1;32(5):1612-21. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5339-11.2012.
A long-standing goal in neuroscience is to perform exhaustive recording of each neuron in a functional local circuit. To achieve this goal, one promising approach is optical imaging of fluorescent calcium indicators, but typically the tens or hundreds of cells imaged simultaneously comprise only a tiny percentage of the neurons in an intact circuit. Here, we show that a recent innovation, objective-coupled planar illumination (OCPI) microscopy, permits simultaneous recording from three-dimensional volumes containing many thousand neurons. We used OCPI microscopy to record chemosensory responses in the mouse vomeronasal epithelium, for which expression of hundreds of receptor types implies high functional diversity. The implications of this diversity for sensory coding were examined using several classes of previously reported vomeronasal ligands, including sulfated steroids. A collection of just 12 sulfated steroids activated more than a quarter of the neurons in the apical vomeronasal epithelium; unexpectedly, responses were functionally organized into a modest number of classes with characteristic spatial distribution. Recording from a whole sensory system thus revealed new organizational principles.
神经科学的一个长期目标是对功能局部回路中的每个神经元进行详尽的记录。为了实现这一目标，一种很有前途的方法是对荧光钙指示剂进行光学成像，但通常同时成像的数十或数百个细胞仅占完整回路中神经元的一小部分。在这里，我们展示了一种最近的创新技术，即目标耦合平面照明（OCPI）显微镜，它可以从包含数千个神经元的三维体积中进行同时记录。我们使用 OCPI 显微镜记录了小鼠犁鼻器上皮的化学感觉反应，其中数百种受体类型的表达意味着功能高度多样化。使用几类先前报道的犁鼻器配体，包括硫酸甾体，研究了这种多样性对感觉编码的影响。仅仅 12 种硫酸甾体的集合就激活了上犁鼻器上皮超过四分之一的神经元；出乎意料的是，反应在功能上组织成少数具有特征空间分布的类。对整个感觉系统的记录揭示了新的组织原则。
