Sensorimotor Representations in Cerebellar Granule Cells in Larval Zebrafish Are Dense, Spatially Organized, and Non-temporally Patterned.
By Laura D. Knogler, D. Markov, Elena I. Dragomir, Vilim Štih, R. Portugues. 2017
112 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A fundamental question in neurobiology is how animals integrate external sensory information from their environment with self-generated motor and sensory signals in order to guide motor behavior and adaptation. The cerebellum is a vertebrate hindbrain region where all of these signals converge and that has been implicated in the acquisition, coordination, and calibration of motor activity. Theories of cerebellar function postulate that granule cells encode a variety of sensorimotor signals in the cerebellar input layer. These models suggest that representations should be high-dimensional, sparse, and temporally patterned. However, in vivo physiological recordings addressing these points have been limited and in particular have been unable to measure the spatiotemporal dynamics of population-wide activity. In this study, we use both calcium imaging and electrophysiology in the awake larval zebrafish to investigate how cerebellar granule cells encode three types of sensory stimuli as well as stimulus-evoked motor behaviors. We find that a large fraction of all granule cells are active in response to these stimuli, such that representations are not sparse at the population level. We find instead that most responses belong to only one of a small number of distinct activity profiles, which are temporally homogeneous and anatomically clustered. We furthermore identify granule cells that are active during swimming behaviors and others that are multimodal for sensory and motor variables. When we pharmacologically change the threshold of a stimulus-evoked behavior, we observe correlated changes in these representations. Finally, electrophysiological data show no evidence for temporal patterning in the coding of different stimulus durations.
Subfields: Cell Biology, Neurology, Sensory Systems
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Citations in the corpus
- Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, positive): “Using this approach (or a related approach using a synthetic calcium indicator), several recent studies have reported that granule cell population activity is far denser than had previously been believed, with more than two thirds of imaged granule cells being active concurrently in some cases (Figu”
- Morphological Constraints on Cerebellar Granule Cell Combinatorial Diversity (2017, background): “In both mice and fish, between 20% and 80% of monitored GrCs could be active within a short epoch, far 1% predicted (Giovannucci et al., 2017; Knogler et al., 2017; Wagner et al., 2017).”
- Shared cortex-cerebellum dynamics in the execution and learning of a motor task (2019, unknown): “First, recording granule cells is challenging due to their small size and high packing density, with recordings from ensembles of granule cells in behaving animals only recently achieved via two-photon Ca imaging (Giovannucci et al., 2017; Knogler et al., 2017; Wagner et al., 2017).”
- Population-scale organization of cerebellar granule neuron signaling during a visuomotor behavior (2017, result): “…simple oculomotor behavior showed that responses did not appear sparse either in space or time, which complements recent findings in zebrafish (Knogler et al., 2017) and mice(Ozden et al., 2012; Powell et al., 2015) that suggest granule cells also use a non-sparse code during more complex…”
- Computational Principles of Supervised Learning in the Cerebellum (2018, unknown): “…be as sparse as originally envisioned, because widespread activation of many granule cells can occur during natural behaviors and in response to sensory stimulation (Giovannucci et al. 2017, Jorntell & Ekerot 2006, Knogler et al. 2017, Ozden et al. 2012, van Beugen et al. 2013, Wagner et al. 2017).”