Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China.
1] Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China [2] University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
Nat Commun. 2015 Apr 14;6:6802. doi: 10.1038/ncomms7802.
The responses of visual cortical neurons to natural stimuli are both reliable and sparse. These properties require inhibition, yet the contribution of specific types of inhibitory neurons is not well understood. Here we demonstrate that optogenetic suppression of parvalbumin (PV)- but not somatostatin (SOM)-expressing interneurons reduces response reliability in the primary visual cortex of anaesthetized and awake mice. PV suppression leads to increases in the low firing rates and decreases in the high firing rates of cortical neurons, resulting in an overall reduction of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In contrast, SOM suppression generally increases the overall firing rate for most neurons, without affecting the SNR. Further analysis reveals that PV, but not SOM, suppression impairs neural discrimination of natural stimuli. Together, these results reveal a critical role for PV interneurons in the formation of reliable visual cortical representations of natural stimuli.
视觉皮层神经元对自然刺激的反应既可靠又稀疏。这些特性需要抑制，但特定类型的抑制性神经元的贡献尚不清楚。在这里，我们证明光遗传学抑制表达 parvalbumin（PV）而非 somatostatin（SOM）的中间神经元会降低麻醉和清醒小鼠初级视觉皮层的反应可靠性。PV 抑制导致皮质神经元的低发射率增加和高发射率降低，从而导致信噪比（SNR）整体降低。相比之下，SOM 抑制通常会增加大多数神经元的整体发射率，而不会影响 SNR。进一步的分析表明，PV 抑制而不是 SOM 抑制会损害对自然刺激的神经辨别。总之，这些结果揭示了 PV 中间神经元在形成可靠的自然刺激视觉皮层表示中的关键作用。
