Back to Search
Start Over
Physiological characterization of a rare subpopulation of doublet-spiking neurons in the ferret lateral geniculate nucleus
- Source :
- J Neurophysiol
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- American Physiological Society, 2020.
-
Abstract
- Interest in exploring homologies in the early visual pathways of rodents, carnivores, and primates has recently grown. Retinas of these species contain morphologically and physiologically heterogeneous retinal ganglion cells that form the basis for parallel visual information processing streams. Whether rare retinal ganglion cells with unusual visual response properties in carnivores and primates project to the visual thalamus and drive unusual visual responses among thalamic relay neurons is poorly understood. We surveyed neurophysiological responses among hundreds of lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) neurons in ferrets and observed a novel subpopulation of LGN neurons displaying doublet-spiking waveforms. Some visual response properties of doublet-spiking LGN neurons, like contrast and temporal frequency tuning, were intermediate to those of X and Y LGN neurons. Interestingly, most doublet-spiking LGN neurons were tuned for orientation and displayed direction selectivity for horizontal motion. Spatiotemporal receptive fields of doublet-spiking neurons were diverse and included center/surround organization, On/Off responses, and elongated separate On and Off subregions. Optogenetic activation of corticogeniculate feedback did not alter the tuning or spatiotemporal receptive fields of doublet-spiking neurons, suggesting that their unusual tuning properties were inherited from retinal inputs. The doublet-spiking LGN neurons were found throughout the depth of LGN recording penetrations. Together these findings suggest that while extremely rare (
- Subjects :
- Retinal Ganglion Cells
genetic structures
Physiology
Visual Physiology
Action Potentials
Biology
Lateral geniculate nucleus
Retinal ganglion
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Species Specificity
Animals
Visual Pathways
030304 developmental biology
Neurons
0303 health sciences
General Neuroscience
Ferrets
Geniculate Bodies
eye diseases
Electrophysiological Phenomena
Optogenetics
nervous system
Visual Perception
sense organs
Neuroscience
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15221598 and 00223077
- Volume :
- 124
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Journal of Neurophysiology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....701ff65cf0d04d5d03c35cdc87618c96