Firing Rate Homeostasis in Visual Cortex of Freely Behaving Rodents

By Keith B. Hengen, Mary E. Lambo, Stephen D. Van Hooser, Donald B. Katz, Gina G. Turrigiano. 2013

339 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary It has been postulated that homeostatic mechanisms maintain stable circuit function by keeping neuronal firing within a set-point range, but such firing rate homeostasis has never been demonstrated in vivo. Here we use chronic multielectrode recordings to monitor firing rates in visual cortex of freely behaving rats during chronic monocular visual deprivation (MD). Firing rates in V1 were suppressed over the first 2 d of MD, but then rebounded to baseline over the next 2–3 d despite continued MD. This drop and rebound in firing was accompanied by bi-directional changes in mEPSC amplitude measured ex vivo. The rebound in firing was independent of sleep-wake state but was cell-type specific, as putative FS and regular spiking neurons responded to MD with different time-courses. These data establish for the first time that homeostatic mechanisms within the intact CNS act to stabilize neuronal firing rates in the face of sustained sensory perturbations.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Variance and invariance of neuronal long-term representations (2017, neutral): “Shortly after this drop in activity, however, the average population activity returns to its pre-‐MD level [82].”
High-density, long-lasting, and multi-region electrophysiological recordings using polymer electrode arrays (2018, positive): “3 possibility: recording small numbers of neurons over the span of days has revealed surprising long-timescale firing patterns with functional implications, particularly with respect to learning (Hengen et al., 2013; Hengen et al., 2016).”
Cell Types, Network Homeostasis, and Pathological Compensation from a Biologically Plausible Ion Channel Expression Model. (2015, positive): “Thus, neurons can exhibit firing rate set points (Hengen et al., 2013) or even maintenance of a coordinated motor pattern (Figure 6), but this does not necessarily mean the system directly measures and maintains these specific properties.”
Automated long-term recording and analysis of neural activity in behaving animals (2016, background): “…remained largely unchanged even over 10 days of recording (Figure 3B-D), suggesting that activity levels of single units in both cortex and striatum are stable over long timescales, and that individual units maintain their own firing rate set-point (Hengen et al., 2013; Marder and Goaillard, 2006).”
Cell Types, Network Homeostasis, and Pathological Compensation from a Biologically Plausible Ion Channel Expression Model (2014, positive): “Thus, neurons can exhibit firing rate set points (Hengen et al., 2013) or even maintenance of a coordinated motor pattern (Figure 6), but this does not necessarily mean the system directly measures and maintains these specific properties.”
Rapid homeostasis by disinhibition during whisker map plasticity (2014, background): “, before the onset of classical Hebbian response plasticity) is proposed as an early step in lesion-induced adult plasticity in S1 (45) and tone-shock conditioning in auditory cortex (46), and it was recently observed in visual cortex after visual deprivation (10, 16).”