Molnár Benedek, Sere Péter, Bordé Sándor, Koós Krisztián, Zsigri Nikolett, Horváth Péter, Lőrincz Magor L
Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Neuroscience, Faculty of Sciences, University of Szeged, 6726 Szeged, Hungary.
Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit, Biological Research Centre, 6726 Szeged, Hungary.
Cereb Cortex Commun. 2021 Mar 16;2(2):tgab020. doi: 10.1093/texcom/tgab020. eCollection 2021.
State-dependent thalamocortical activity is important for sensory coding, oscillations, and cognition. The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) relays visual information to the cortex, but the state-dependent spontaneous activity of LGN neurons in awake behaving animals remains controversial. Using a combination of pupillometry, extracellular, and intracellular recordings from identified LGN neurons in behaving mice, we show that thalamocortical (TC) neurons and interneurons are distinctly correlated to arousal forming two complementary coalitions. Intracellular recordings indicated that the membrane potential of LGN TC neurons was tightly correlated to fluctuations in pupil size. Inactivating the corticothalamic feedback to the LGN suppressed the arousal dependency of LGN neurons. Taken together, our results show that LGN neuronal membrane potential and action potential output are dynamically linked to arousal-dependent brain states in awake mice, and this might have important functional implications.
状态依赖的丘脑皮质活动对感觉编码、振荡和认知很重要。外侧膝状体核（LGN）将视觉信息传递到皮层，但清醒行为动物中LGN神经元的状态依赖自发活动仍存在争议。通过结合行为小鼠中已识别的LGN神经元的瞳孔测量、细胞外和细胞内记录，我们发现丘脑皮质（TC）神经元和中间神经元与觉醒明显相关，形成两个互补的联合体。细胞内记录表明，LGN TC神经元的膜电位与瞳孔大小的波动紧密相关。使LGN的皮质丘脑反馈失活会抑制LGN神经元对觉醒的依赖性。综合来看，我们的结果表明，在清醒小鼠中，LGN神经元膜电位和动作电位输出与觉醒依赖的脑状态动态相连，这可能具有重要的功能意义。
