Control of response reliability by parvalbumin-expressing interneurons in visual cortex

Yingjie Zhu, Wenhui Qiao, Kefei Liu, Huiyuan Zhong and Haishan Yao ()
Additional contact information
Yingjie Zhu: Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China
Wenhui Qiao: Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China
Kefei Liu: Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China
Huiyuan Zhong: Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China
Haishan Yao: Institute of Neuroscience and State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract The responses of visual cortical neurons to natural stimuli are both reliable and sparse. These properties require inhibition, yet the contribution of specific types of inhibitory neurons is not well understood. Here we demonstrate that optogenetic suppression of parvalbumin (PV)- but not somatostatin (SOM)-expressing interneurons reduces response reliability in the primary visual cortex of anaesthetized and awake mice. PV suppression leads to increases in the low firing rates and decreases in the high firing rates of cortical neurons, resulting in an overall reduction of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In contrast, SOM suppression generally increases the overall firing rate for most neurons, without affecting the SNR. Further analysis reveals that PV, but not SOM, suppression impairs neural discrimination of natural stimuli. Together, these results reveal a critical role for PV interneurons in the formation of reliable visual cortical representations of natural stimuli.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7802 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms7802

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7802

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().