Neuronal silence as a prosurvival factor for adult-born olfactory bulb interneurons

Adult-born cells, arriving daily into the rodent olfactory bulb, either integrate into the neural circuitry or get eliminated. However, whether these two populations differ in their morphological or functional properties remains unclear. Using longitudinal in vivo two-photon imaging, we monitored dendritic morphogenesis, odor-evoked responsiveness, ongoing Ca2+ signaling, and survival/death of adult-born juxtaglomerular neurons (abJGNs). We found that the maturation of abJGNs is accompanied by a significant reduction in den-dritic complexity, with surviving and subsequently eliminated cells showing similar degrees of dendritic remodeling. Surprisingly,-63% of eliminated abJGNs acquired odor responsiveness before death, with amplitudes and time courses of odor-evoked responses similar to those recorded in surviving cells. However, the subsequently eliminated cell population exhibited significantly higher ongoing Ca2+ signals, with a difference visible even 10 days before death. Quantitative supervised machine learning analysis revealed a relationship between the abJGNs' activity and survival probability, with low neuronal activity being supportive for survival.

Automated summary

Adult-born cells in the rodent olfactory bulb either integrate into the neural circuitry or get eliminated. Morphological and functional properties between these two populations are still unclear. This study used longitudinal in vivo two-photon imaging to investigate the dendritic morphogenesis, odor-evoked responsiveness, ongoing Ca2+ signaling, and survival/death of adult-born juxtaglomerular neurons (abJGNs). The results showed that maturation of abJGNs is accompanied by a reduction in dendritic complexity, and eliminated cells exhibit odor responsiveness similar to surviving cells but exhibit higher ongoing Ca2+ signals before death. Machine learning analysis revealed a relationship between abJGNs' activity and survival probability.