High-throughput volumetric mapping of synaptic transmission.

Volumetric imaging of synaptic transmission in vivo requires high spatial and high temporal resolution. Shaping the wavefront of two-photon fluorescence excitation light, we developed Bessel-droplet foci for high-contrast and high-resolution volumetric imaging of synapses. Applying our method to imaging glutamate release, we demonstrated high-throughput mapping of excitatory inputs at >1,000 synapses per volume and >500 dendritic spines per neuron in vivo and unveiled previously unseen features of functional synaptic organization in the mouse primary visual cortex.

An adaptive optics module for deep tissue multiphoton imaging in vivo.

Understanding complex biological systems requires visualizing structures and processes deep within living organisms. We developed a compact adaptive optics module and incorporated it into two- and three-photon fluorescence microscopes, to measure and correct tissue-induced aberrations. We resolved synaptic structures in deep cortical and subcortical areas of the mouse brain, and demonstrated high-resolution imaging of neuronal structures and somatosensory-evoked calcium responses in the mouse spinal cord at great depths in vivo.

Differential Short-Term Plasticity of PV and SST Neurons Accounts for Adaptation and Facilitation of Cortical Neurons to Auditory Tones.

Cortical responses to sensory stimuli are strongly modulated by temporal context. One of the best studied examples of such modulation is sensory adaptation. We first show that in response to repeated tones pyramidal (Pyr) neurons in male mouse auditory cortex (A1) exhibit facilitating and stable responses, in addition to adapting responses. To examine the potential mechanisms underlying these distinct temporal profiles, we developed a reduced spiking model of sensory cortical circuits that incorporated the signature short-term synaptic plasticity (STP) profiles of the inhibitory parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SST) interneurons. The model accounted for all three temporal response profiles as the result of dynamic changes in excitatory/inhibitory balance produced by STP, primarily through shifts in the relative latency of Pyr and inhibitory neurons. Transition between the three response profiles was possible by changing the strength of the inhibitory PV→Pyr and SST→Pyr synapses. The model predicted that a unit's latency would be related to its temporal profile. Consistent with this prediction, the latency of stable units was significantly shorter than that of adapting and facilitating units. Furthermore, because of the history-dependence of STP the model generated a paradoxical prediction: that inactivation of inhibitory neurons during one tone would decrease the response of A1 neurons to a subsequent tone. Indeed, we observed that optogenetic inactivation of PV neurons during one tone counterintuitively decreased the spiking of Pyr neurons to a subsequent tone 400 ms later. These results provide evidence that STP is critical to temporal context-dependent responses in the sensory cortex.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Our perception of speech and music depends strongly on temporal context, i.e., the significance of a stimulus depends on the preceding stimuli. Complementary neural mechanisms are needed to sometimes ignore repetitive stimuli (e.g., the tic of a clock) or detect meaningful repetition (e.g., consecutive tones in Morse code). We modeled a neural circuit that accounts for diverse experimentally-observed response profiles in auditory cortex (A1) neurons, based on known forms of short-term synaptic plasticity (STP). Whether the simulated circuit reduced, maintained, or enhanced its response to repeated tones depended on the relative dominance of two different types of inhibitory cells. The model made novel predictions that were experimentally validated. Results define an important role for STP in temporal context-dependent perception.

Bidirectional Regulation of Innate and Learned Behaviors That Rely on Frequency Discrimination by Cortical Inhibitory Neurons.

The ability to discriminate tones of different frequencies is fundamentally important for everyday hearing. While neurons in the primary auditory cortex (AC) respond differentially to tones of different frequencies, whether and how AC regulates auditory behaviors that rely on frequency discrimination remains poorly understood. Here, we find that the level of activity of inhibitory neurons in AC controls frequency specificity in innate and learned auditory behaviors that rely on frequency discrimination. Photoactivation of parvalbumin-positive interneurons (PVs) improved the ability of the mouse to detect a shift in tone frequency, whereas photosuppression of PVs impaired the performance. Furthermore, photosuppression of PVs during discriminative auditory fear conditioning increased generalization of conditioned response across tone frequencies, whereas PV photoactivation preserved normal specificity of learning. The observed changes in behavioral performance were correlated with bidirectional changes in the magnitude of tone-evoked responses, consistent with predictions of a model of a coupled excitatory-inhibitory cortical network. Direct photoactivation of excitatory neurons, which did not change tone-evoked response magnitude, did not affect behavioral performance in either task. Our results identify a new function for inhibition in the auditory cortex, demonstrating that it can improve or impair acuity of innate and learned auditory behaviors that rely on frequency discrimination.

Gain Control in the Auditory Cortex Evoked by Changing Temporal Correlation of Sounds.

Natural sounds exhibit statistical variation in their spectrotemporal structure. This variation is central to identification of unique environmental sounds and to vocal communication. Using limited resources, the auditory system must create a faithful representation of sounds across the full range of variation in temporal statistics. Imaging studies in humans demonstrated that the auditory cortex is sensitive to temporal correlations. However, the mechanisms by which the auditory cortex represents the spectrotemporal structure of sounds and how neuronal activity adjusts to vastly different statistics remain poorly understood. In this study, we recorded responses of neurons in the primary auditory cortex of awake rats to sounds with systematically varied temporal correlation, to determine whether and how this feature alters sound encoding. Neuronal responses adapted to changing stimulus temporal correlation. This adaptation was mediated by a change in the firing rate gain of neuronal responses rather than their spectrotemporal properties. This gain adaptation allowed neurons to maintain similar firing rates across stimuli with different statistics, preserving their ability to efficiently encode temporal modulation. This dynamic gain control mechanism may underlie comprehension of vocalizations and other natural sounds under different contexts, subject to distortions in temporal correlation structure via stretching or compression.

Stable encoding of sounds over a broad range of statistical parameters in the auditory cortex.

Natural auditory scenes possess highly structured statistical regularities, which are dictated by the physics of sound production in nature, such as scale-invariance. We recently identified that natural water sounds exhibit a particular type of scale invariance, in which the temporal modulation within spectral bands scales with the centre frequency of the band. Here, we tested how neurons in the mammalian primary auditory cortex encode sounds that exhibit this property, but differ in their statistical parameters. The stimuli varied in spectro-temporal density and cyclo-temporal statistics over several orders of magnitude, corresponding to a range of water-like percepts, from pattering of rain to a slow stream. We recorded neuronal activity in the primary auditory cortex of awake rats presented with these stimuli. The responses of the majority of individual neurons were selective for a subset of stimuli with specific statistics. However, as a neuronal population, the responses were remarkably stable over large changes in stimulus statistics, exhibiting a similar range in firing rate, response strength, variability and information rate, and only minor variation in receptive field parameters. This pattern of neuronal responses suggests a potentially general principle for cortical encoding of complex acoustic scenes: while individual cortical neurons exhibit selectivity for specific statistical features, a neuronal population preserves a constant response structure across a broad range of statistical parameters.

Emergence of invariant representation of vocalizations in the auditory cortex.

An essential task of the auditory system is to discriminate between different communication signals, such as vocalizations. In everyday acoustic environments, the auditory system needs to be capable of performing the discrimination under different acoustic distortions of vocalizations. To achieve this, the auditory system is thought to build a representation of vocalizations that is invariant to their basic acoustic transformations. The mechanism by which neuronal populations create such an invariant representation within the auditory cortex is only beginning to be understood. We recorded the responses of populations of neurons in the primary and nonprimary auditory cortex of rats to original and acoustically distorted vocalizations. We found that populations of neurons in the nonprimary auditory cortex exhibited greater invariance in encoding vocalizations over acoustic transformations than neuronal populations in the primary auditory cortex. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that invariant representations are created gradually through hierarchical transformation within the auditory pathway.

Adaptive optical third-harmonic generation microscopy for in vivo imaging of tissues.

Third-harmonic generation microscopy is a powerful label-free nonlinear imaging technique, providing essential information about structural characteristics of cells and tissues without requiring external labelling agents. In this work, we integrated a recently developed compact adaptive optics module into a third-harmonic generation microscope, to measure and correct for optical aberrations in complex tissues. Taking advantage of the high sensitivity of the third-harmonic generation process to material interfaces and thin membranes, along with the 1,300-nm excitation wavelength used here, our adaptive optical third-harmonic generation microscope enabled high-resolution in vivo imaging within highly scattering biological model systems. Examples include imaging of myelinated axons and vascular structures within the mouse spinal cord and deep cortical layers of the mouse brain, along with imaging of key anatomical features in the roots of the model plant Brachypodium distachyon. In all instances, aberration correction led to enhancements in image quality.

Adaptive optical third-harmonic generation microscopy for in vivo imaging of tissues.

Third-harmonic generation microscopy is a powerful label-free nonlinear imaging technique, providing essential information about structural characteristics of cells and tissues without requiring external labelling agents. In this work, we integrated a recently developed compact adaptive optics module into a third-harmonic generation microscope, to measure and correct for optical aberrations in complex tissues. Taking advantage of the high sensitivity of the third-harmonic generation process to material interfaces and thin membranes, along with the 1,300-nm excitation wavelength used here, our adaptive optical third-harmonic generation microscope enabled high-resolution in vivo imaging within highly scattering biological model systems. Examples include imaging of myelinated axons and vascular structures within the mouse spinal cord and deep cortical layers of the mouse brain, along with imaging of key anatomical features in the roots of the model plant Brachypodium distachyon. In all instances, aberration correction led to significant enhancements in image quality.

Ectopic expression of select innexins in individual central neurons couples them to pre-existing neuronal or glial networks that express the same innexin.

Fifteen of the 21 innexin (Inx) genes (Hve-inx) found in the genome of the medicinal leech, Hirudo verbana, are expressed in the CNS (Kandarian et al., 2012). Two are expressed pan-neuronally, while the others are restricted in their expression to small numbers of cells, in some cases reflecting the membership of known networks of electrically coupled and dye-coupled neurons or glial cells. We report here that when Hve-inx genes characteristic of discrete coupled networks were expressed ectopically in neurons known not to express them, the experimental cells were found to become dye coupled with the other cells in that network. Hve-inx6 is normally expressed by only three neurons in each ganglion, which form strongly dye-coupled electrical connections with each other [Shortening-Coupling interneuron (S-CI) network] (Muller and Scott, 1981; Dykes and Macagno, 2006). But when Hve-inx6 was ectopically expressed in a variety of central embryonic neurons, those cells became dye coupled with the S-CI network. Similarly, Hve-inx2 is normally uniquely expressed by the ganglion's large glial cells, but when it was ectopically expressed in different central neurons, they became dye coupled to the glial cells. In contrast, overexpression of the pan-neuronal Inx genes Hve-inx1 and Hve-inx14 did not yield any novel instances of dye coupling to pre-existent neuronal networks. These results reveal that expression of certain innexins is sufficient to couple individual neurons to pre-existing networks in the CNS. We propose that a primary determinant of selective neuronal connectivity and circuit formation in the leech is the surface expression of unique subsets of gap junctional proteins.

Encoding of ultrasonic vocalizations in the auditory cortex.

One of the central tasks of the mammalian auditory system is to represent information about acoustic communicative signals, such as vocalizations. However, the neuronal computations underlying vocalization encoding in the central auditory system are poorly understood. To learn how the rat auditory cortex encodes information about conspecific vocalizations, we presented a library of natural and temporally transformed ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) to awake rats while recording neural activity in the primary auditory cortex (A1) with chronically implanted multielectrode probes. Many neurons reliably and selectively responded to USVs. The response strength to USVs correlated strongly with the response strength to frequency-modulated (FM) sweeps and the FM rate tuning index, suggesting that related mechanisms generate responses to USVs as to FM sweeps. The response strength further correlated with the neuron's best frequency, with the strongest responses produced by neurons whose best frequency was in the ultrasonic frequency range. For responses of each neuron to each stimulus group, we fitted a novel predictive model: a reduced generalized linear-nonlinear model (GLNM) that takes the frequency modulation and single-tone amplitude as the only two input parameters. The GLNM accurately predicted neuronal responses to previously unheard USVs, and its prediction accuracy was higher than that of an analogous spectrogram-based linear-nonlinear model. The response strength of neurons and the model prediction accuracy were higher for original, rather than temporally transformed, vocalizations. These results indicate that A1 processes original USVs differentially than transformed USVs, indicating preference for temporal statistics of the original vocalizations.

In vivo volumetric imaging of calcium and glutamate activity at synapses with high spatiotemporal resolution.

Studying neuronal activity at synapses requires high spatiotemporal resolution. For high spatial resolution in vivo imaging at depth, adaptive optics (AO) is required to correct sample-induced aberrations. To improve temporal resolution, Bessel focus has been combined with two-photon fluorescence microscopy (2PFM) for fast volumetric imaging at subcellular lateral resolution. To achieve both high-spatial and high-temporal resolution at depth, we develop an efficient AO method that corrects the distorted wavefront of Bessel focus at the objective focal plane and recovers diffraction-limited imaging performance. Applying AO Bessel focus scanning 2PFM to volumetric imaging of zebrafish larval and mouse brains down to 500 µm depth, we demonstrate substantial improvements in the sensitivity and resolution of structural and functional measurements of synapses in vivo. This enables volumetric measurements of synaptic calcium and glutamate activity at high accuracy, including the simultaneous recording of glutamate activity of apical and basal dendritic spines in the mouse cortex.

Cortical Interneurons Differentially Shape Frequency Tuning following Adaptation.

Neuronal stimulus selectivity is shaped by feedforward and recurrent excitatory-inhibitory interactions. In the auditory cortex (AC), parvalbumin- (PV) and somatostatin-positive (SOM) inhibitory interneurons differentially modulate frequency-dependent responses of excitatory neurons. Responsiveness of neurons in the AC to sound is also dependent on stimulus history. We found that the inhibitory effects of SOMs and PVs diverged as a function of adaptation to temporal repetition of tones. Prior to adaptation, suppressing either SOM or PV inhibition drove both increases and decreases in excitatory spiking activity. After adaptation, suppressing SOM activity caused predominantly disinhibitory effects, whereas suppressing PV activity still evoked bi-directional changes. SOM, but not PV-driven inhibition, dynamically modulated frequency tuning with adaptation. Unlike PV-driven inhibition, SOM-driven inhibition elicited gain-like increases in frequency tuning reflective of adaptation. Our findings suggest that distinct cortical interneurons differentially shape tuning to sensory stimuli across the neuronal receptive field, altering frequency selectivity of excitatory neurons during adaptation.

Complementary control of sensory adaptation by two types of cortical interneurons.

Reliably detecting unexpected sounds is important for environmental awareness and survival. By selectively reducing responses to frequently, but not rarely, occurring sounds, auditory cortical neurons are thought to enhance the brain's ability to detect unexpected events through stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA). The majority of neurons in the primary auditory cortex exhibit SSA, yet little is known about the underlying cortical circuits. We found that two types of cortical interneurons differentially amplify SSA in putative excitatory neurons. Parvalbumin-positive interneurons (PVs) amplify SSA by providing non-specific inhibition: optogenetic suppression of PVs led to an equal increase in responses to frequent and rare tones. In contrast, somatostatin-positive interneurons (SOMs) selectively reduce excitatory responses to frequent tones: suppression of SOMs led to an increase in responses to frequent, but not to rare tones. A mutually coupled excitatory-inhibitory network model accounts for distinct mechanisms by which cortical inhibitory neurons enhance the brain's sensitivity to unexpected sounds.