Sparse activity of identified dentate granule cells during spatial exploration

By Maria Diamantaki, Markus Frey, Philipp Berens, Patricia Preston-Ferrer, Andrea Burgalossi. 2016

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the dentate gyrus – a key component of spatial memory circuits – granule cells (GCs) are known to be morphologically diverse and to display heterogeneous activity profiles during behavior. To resolve structure–function relationships, we juxtacellularly recorded and labeled single GCs in freely moving rats. We found that the vast majority of neurons were silent during exploration. Most active GCs displayed a characteristic spike waveform, fired at low rates and showed spatial activity. Primary dendritic parameters were sufficient for classifying neurons as active or silent with high accuracy. Our data thus support a sparse coding scheme in the dentate gyrus and provide a possible link between structural and functional heterogeneity among the GC population. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20252.001

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, neutral): “One caveat of these studies is that, due to the extremely low firing rates of granule cells during wakefulness (O’Keefe, 1976; Jung and McNaughton, 1993; Neunuebel and Knierim, 2012; Diamantaki et al., 2016), extracellular recording may underestimate the fraction of “silent” cells.”
Spatial representations of granule cells and mossy cells of the dentate gyrus (2017, methodology): “Juxtacellular recordings were targeted to the DG by taking advantage of characteristic signatures of the local field potential activity (as in Diamantaki et al., 2016a) and depth from pia.”
Physiological properties and behavioral correlates of hippocampal granule cells and mossy cells (2017, unknown): “Our findings are in agreement with those of others that show that the majority of granule cells are silent during waking (Jung and McNaughton, 1993; Gothard et al., 2001; Neunuebel and Knierim, 2012, 2014; Danielson et al., 2016; Diamantaki et al., 2016).”