Journal
NEURON
Volume 110, Issue 13, Pages 2110-+Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.04.012
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [F31 EY030737, DP2 EY026770-01]
- Northwestern University Department of Ophthalmology Derrik T. Vail Endowed Chair Funds
- Research to Prevent Blindness Challenge Career Development Award
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study reveals how the intrinsic properties of retinal ganglion cells affect feature selectivity. By comparing different types of RGCs, researchers found that differences in their intrinsic properties, rather than synaptic inputs, resulted in differences in contrast response functions.
Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are the spiking projection neurons of the eye that encode different features of the visual environment. The circuits providing synaptic input to different RGC types to drive feature selectivity have been studied extensively, but there has been less research aimed at understanding the intrinsic prop-erties and how they impact feature selectivity. We introduce an RGC type in the mouse, the Bursty Sup-pressed-by-Contrast (bSbC) RGC, and compared it to the OFF sustained alpha (OFFsA). Differences in their contrast response functions arose from differences not in synaptic inputs but in their intrinsic properties. Spike generation was the key intrinsic property behind this functional difference; the bSbC RGC undergoes depolarization block while the OFFsA RGC maintains a high spike rate. Our results demonstrate that differ-ences in intrinsic properties allow these two RGC types to detect and relay distinct features of an identical visual stimulus to the brain.
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