GABAergic Neurons in Ferret Visual Cortex Participate in Functionally Specific Networks

Gordon B. Smith, Daniel E. Wilson, Amanda L. Jacob, Theo Walker, Jordane Dimidschstein, Gord Fishell, David Fitzpatrick

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

48 Scopus citations

Abstract

Functional circuits in the visual cortex require the coordinated activity of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Molecular genetic approaches in the mouse have led to the “local non-specific pooling principle” of inhibitory connectivity, in which inhibitory neurons are untuned for stimulus features due to the random pooling of local inputs. However, it remains unclear whether this principle generalizes to species with a columnar organization of feature selectivity such as carnivores, primates, and humans. Here we use virally mediated GABAergic-specific GCaMP6f expression to demonstrate that inhibitory neurons in ferret visual cortex respond robustly and selectively to oriented stimuli. We find that the tuning of inhibitory neurons is inconsistent with the local non-specific pooling of excitatory inputs and that inhibitory neurons exhibit orientation-specific noise correlations with local and distant excitatory neurons. These findings challenge the generality of the non-specific pooling principle for inhibitory neurons, suggesting different rules for functional excitatory-inhibitory interactions in non-murine species.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1058-1065.e4
JournalNeuron
Volume93
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 8 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Inc.

Keywords

  • GABA
  • Visual cortex
  • excitatory neurons
  • ferret
  • inhibitory neurons
  • orientation selectivity
  • parvalbumin
  • somatostatin

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