Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 116, Issue 20, Pages 10122-10129Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1812453116
Keywords
fMRI; vestibular system; optogenetic; medial vestibular nucleus; vestibular functions
Categories
Funding
- Hong Kong Research Grant Council [C7048-16G, HKU17103015]
- Lam Woo Foundation
- Shenzhen Municipal Brain Science Platform Technology Project
- 2018-2019 Guangdong Provincial Key Brain Science and Research Project
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Blood oxygen level-dependent functional MRI (fMRI) constitutes a powerful neuroimaging technology to map brain-wide functions in response to specific sensory or cognitive tasks. However, fMRI mapping of the vestibular system, which is pivotal for our sense of balance, poses significant challenges. Physical constraints limit a subject's ability to perform motion- and balance-related tasks inside the scanner, and current stimulation techniques within the scanner are nonspecific to delineate complex vestibular nucleus (VN) pathways. Using fMRI, we examined brain-wide neural activity patterns elicited by optogenetically stimulating excitatory neurons of a major vestibular nucleus, the ipsilateral medial VN (MVN). We demonstrated robust optogenetically evoked fMRI activations bilaterally at sensorimotor cortices and their associated thalamic nuclei (auditory, visual, somatosensory, and motor), high-order cortices (cingulate, retrosplenial, temporal association, and parietal), and hippocampal formations (dentate gyrus, entorhinal cortex, and subiculum). We then examined the modulatory effects of the vestibular system on sensory processing using auditory and visual stimulation in combination with optogenetic excitation of the MVN. We found enhanced responses to sound in the auditory cortex, thalamus, and inferior colliculus ipsilateral to the stimulated MVN. In the visual pathway, we observed enhanced responses to visual stimuli in the ipsilateral visual cortex, thalamus, and contralateral superior colliculus. Taken together, our imaging findings reveal multiple brain-wide central vestibular pathways. We demonstrate large-scale modulatory effects of the vestibular system on sensory processing.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available