Functional specificity of local synaptic connections in neocortical networks

By H. Ko, Sonja B. Hofer, Bruno Pichler, K. Buchanan, Per Jesper Sjöström, Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel. Nature, 2011

865 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neuronal connectivity is fundamental to information processing in the brain. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms of sensory processing requires uncovering how connection patterns between neurons relate to their function. On a coarse scale, long-range projections can preferentially link cortical regions with similar responses to sensory stimuli. But on the local scale, where dendrites and axons overlap substantially, the functional specificity of connections remains unknown. Here we determine synaptic connectivity between nearby layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in vitro, the response properties of which were first characterized in mouse visual cortex in vivo. We found that connection probability was related to the similarity of visually driven neuronal activity. Neurons with the same preference for oriented stimuli connected at twice the rate of neurons with orthogonal orientation preferences. Neurons responding similarly to naturalistic stimuli formed connections at much higher rates than those with uncorrelated responses. Bidirectional synaptic connections were found more frequently between neuronal pairs with strongly correlated visual responses. Our results reveal the degree of functional specificity of local synaptic connections in the visual cortex, and point to the existence of fine-scale subnetworks dedicated to processing related sensory information.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0718afe9ef66c30aa0c05efede4e6a86ca92f4ed

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Model-based Bayesian inference of neural activity and connectivity from all-optical interrogation of a neural circuit (2017, background): “Our inferred weights are consistent with studies using electrophysiological means to measure connectivity in mouse V1 [1, 2].”
Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Functional Clusters of Neurons in the Mouse Motor Cortex during a Voluntary Movement (2013, background): “…probabilities of reciprocal connections and/or stronger common synaptic inputs might cause clustered cells to be both more active (i.e., higher ATR) and more frequently covary in their activity (i.e., higher tCC) than nonclustered cells (Song et al., 2005; Yoshimura et al., 2005; Ko et al., 2011).”
Neuronal circuits underlying persistent representations despite time varying activity. (2012, background): “Preferential connections for neurons with similar feature vectors have been shown in V1, where neurons with similar orientation preference are more likely to be interconnected [45].”
A Complete Electron Microscopy Volume of the Brain of Adult Drosophila melanogaster (2017, background): “Updated forms of this approach remain important to this day (e.g. Wertz et al., 2015; Wolff et al., 2015), as do electrophysiological measurements of connectivity between small groups of neurons (Ko et al., 2011; Perin et al., 2011; Song et al., 2005).”
In Vivo Monosynaptic Excitatory Transmission between Layer 2 Cortical Pyramidal Neurons (2015, background): “A higher number of connections than expected were bidirectional, in agreement with in vitro recordings in visual cortex (Cossell et al., 2015; Ko et al., 2011; Song et al., 2005) and somatosensory cortex (Markram et al.”
Network Structure within the Cerebellar Input Layer Enables Lossless Sparse Encoding (2014, background): “In mouse primary visual cortex, neurons with similar orientation selectivity have been shown to be preferentially connected (Ko et al., 2011).”
A History of Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (2011, background): “Indeed, a recent study shows that, in mouse visual cortex, pyramidal neurons with similar feature selectivity are significantly more frequently interconnected, yet functionally dissimilar neurons are still connected at considerable albeit lower rates (Ko et al., 2011).”
Linking Connectivity, Dynamics, and Computations in Low-Rank Recurrent Neural Networks. (2017, neutral): “Such predictions can in principle be directly tested in experiments that combine calcium imaging of neural activity in behaving animals with measurements of connectivity between a subset of recorded neurons (Ko et al., 2011).”
Structured Connectivity in Cerebellar Inhibitory Networks (2014, background): “These studies have investigated connectivity between principal cells of the same type (Ko et al., 2011; Perin et al., 2011; Song et al., 2005), where nonrandom features and clustering are present, and between different types of principal cells, where cortical layer specificity governs connectivity (”