Gribizis Alexandra, Fitzpatrick David
Department of Functional Architecture and Development of Cerebral Cortex, Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, Jupiter, Florida, USA.
bioRxiv. 2025 Jul 12:2025.07.09.663735. doi: 10.1101/2025.07.09.663735.
Spontaneous activity before sensory onset is thought to guide the formation of functional neural circuits. In visual cortex, spontaneous activity prior to experience exhibits modular patterns that resemble future visually evoked orientation selective responses. However, the factors at this early stage that build the initial network interactions that support the orientation tuning of modular responses at eye opening remain unknown. Here we provide the first evidence that retinal waves could play an important role by shaping the modular biases in patterns of intracortical connectivity and lay the foundation for orientation selective responses. We demonstrate that slow propagating waves in developing cortex that are dependent on retinal activity recruit specific modular patterns during their movement across the cortical surface, resulting in strikingly elongated patterns of modular coactivity that predict visually-evoked orientation responses at eye opening. Thus axial biases in spontaneous patterns of co-activity are present before the onset of visual experience and could serve as the seed for the developmental emergence of modular orientation representations.
感觉开始前的自发活动被认为可引导功能性神经回路的形成。在视觉皮层中，经验之前的自发活动呈现出模块化模式，类似于未来视觉诱发的方向选择性反应。然而，在这个早期阶段，构建支持睁眼时模块化反应方向调谐的初始网络相互作用的因素仍然未知。在这里，我们提供了首个证据，表明视网膜波可能通过塑造皮质内连接模式中的模块化偏差发挥重要作用，并为方向选择性反应奠定基础。我们证明，发育中的皮层中依赖于视网膜活动的缓慢传播波在穿过皮质表面时会招募特定的模块化模式，从而导致模块化共同活动的显著拉长模式，这种模式可预测睁眼时的视觉诱发方向反应。因此，共同活动的自发模式中的轴向偏差在视觉经验开始之前就已存在，并可能作为模块化方向表征发育出现的种子。
