Information Coding through Adaptive Gating of Synchronized Thalamic Bursting

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Clarissa J Whitmire, Georgia Institute of Technology; Christian Waiblinger, Georgia Institute of Technology; Cornelius Schwarz, University of Tübingen; Garrett Stanley, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2016-02
• Publisher: Elsevier (Cell Press): OAJ
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2015.12.068
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: Cell Reports
• ISSN: 2211-1247
• Volume: 14
• Issue: 4
• Start Page: 795
• End Page: 807
• Grant/Funding Information: This work was supported by US-German Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience grant (US: NSF CRCNS IOS-1131948; German: BMBF CRCNS 01GQ1113) and NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke grants R01NS048285 and R01NS085447.; C.J.W. was supported by GT/Emory NIH Computational Neuroscience Training grant T90DA032466 and the NIH NRSA pre-doctoral fellowship F31NS089412.
• Keywords: Neurology
• Research Categories: Engineering, Biomedical; Biology, Neuroscience

Abstract

It has been posited that the regulation of burst/tonic firing in the thalamus could function as a mechanism for controlling not only how much, but what kind of information is conveyed to downstream cortical targets. Yet how this gating mechanism is adaptively modulated on fast time scales by ongoing sensory inputs in rich sensory environments remains unknown. Using single unit recordings in the rat vibrissa thalamus (VPm), we found that the degree of bottom-up adaptation modulated thalamic burst/tonic firing as well as the synchronization of bursting across the thalamic population along a continuum for which the extremes facilitate detection or discrimination of sensory inputs. Optogenetic control of baseline membrane potential in thalamus further suggests that this regulation may result from an interplay between adaptive changes in thalamic membrane potential and synaptic drive from inputs to thalamus, setting the stage for an intricate control strategy upon which cortical computation is built.