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Published March 2015 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Physiology of Layer 5 Pyramidal Neurons in Mouse Primary Visual Cortex: Coincidence Detection through Bursting

Abstract

L5 pyramidal neurons are the only neocortical cell type with dendrites reaching all six layers of cortex, casting them as one of the main integrators in the cortical column. What is the nature and mode of computation performed in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) given the physiology of L5 pyramidal neurons? First, we experimentally establish active properties of the dendrites of L5 pyramidal neurons of mouse V1 using patch-clamp recordings. Using a detailed multi-compartmental model, we show this physiological setup to be well suited for coincidence detection between basal and apical tuft inputs by controlling the frequency of spike output. We further show how direct inhibition of calcium channels in the dendrites modulates such coincidence detection. To establish the singe-cell computation that this biophysics supports, we show that the combination of frequency-modulation of somatic output by tuft input and (simulated) calcium-channel blockage functionally acts as a composite sigmoidal function. Finally, we explore how this computation provides a mechanism whereby dendritic spiking contributes to orientation tuning in pyramidal neurons.

Additional Information

© 2015 Shai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: August 21, 2014. Accepted: December 15, 2014. Published: March 13, 2015. The authors would like to thank Yazan Billeh and Stefan Mihalas for invaluable discussions concerning the analysis performed here. Data Availability: Code in MATLAB and Neuron can be found at http://senselab.med.yale.edu/modeldb. Funding: This work was supported by the DFG (EXC 257 NeuroCure) the Swiss National Science Foundation PA00P3_131470 NINDS Grant NS 074015, NINDS Grant NS074015, the G. Harold & Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation, Human Frontiers Science Program Grant RGP0032/ 2011, the Whitaker International Program, and by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to ASS. ASS, CAA and CK thank the Allen Institute founders, Paul G. Allen and Jody Allen, for their vision, encouragement, and support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: ASS CAA MEL CK. Performed the experiments: ASS MEL. Analyzed the data: ASS. Wrote the paper: ASS CAA CK.

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Published - journal.pcbi.1004090.pdf

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Created:
September 15, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023