A disinhibitory circuit mediates motor integration in the somatosensory cortex

By Soohyun Lee, I. Kruglikov, Z. J. Huang, G. Fishell, B. Rudy. 2013

736 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The influence of motor activity on sensory processing is crucial for perception and motor execution. However, the underlying circuits are not known. To unravel the circuit by which activity in the primary vibrissal motor cortex (vM1) modulates sensory processing in the primary somatosensory barrel cortex (S1), we used optogenetics to examine the long-range inputs from vM1 to the various neuronal elements in S1. We found that S1-projecting vM1 pyramidal neurons strongly recruited vasointestinal peptide (VIP)-expressing GABAergic interneurons, a subset of serotonin receptor–expressing interneurons. These VIP interneurons preferentially inhibited somatostatin-expressing interneurons, neurons that target the distal dendrites of pyramidal cells. Consistent with this vM1-mediated disinhibitory circuit, the activity of VIP interneurons in vivo increased and that of somatostatin interneurons decreased during whisking. These changes in firing rates during whisking depended on vM1 activity. Our results suggest previously unknown circuitry by which inputs from motor cortex influence sensory processing in sensory cortex.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Alleviating catastrophic forgetting using context-dependent gating and synaptic stabilization (2018, background): “…of several classes of inhibitory neurons underlie this gating process: vasointestinal peptide expressing (VIP) inhibitory neurons receive excitatory input from other cortical areas, which in turn preferentially project onto somatostatin expressing (SOM) inhibitory neurons (Lee et al., 2013).”
Predictive Processing: A Canonical Cortical Computation (2018, positive): “This form of top-down inhibition is a frequent circuit motif in cortex (Lee et al., 2013; Schneider et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2014).”
Cortical membrane potential signature of optimal states for sensory signal detection (2015, background): “One possible circuit involved in arousal-associated changes in cortical responsiveness is the cholinergic activation of inhibitory interneurons in layer 1, whose activity inhibits the activity of other classes of interneurons in layers 2/3 (Fu et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2013; Pi et al., 2013).”
A cortical circuit for gain control by behavioral state (2014, background): “…while SST neurons are inhibited during locomotion are in good agreement with the current consensus that VIP neuronsmainly innervate SST neurons (Lee et al., 2013; Pfeffer et al., 2013; Pi et al., 2013), although different effects on SST neurons have also been reported (Polack et al., 2013).”
Waking State: Rapid Variations Modulate Neural and Behavioral Responses (2015, neutral): “However, it is highly likely that other systems are also involved (reviewed in Lee et al., 2013; Lee and Dan, 2012; Zagha and McCormick, 2014).”
Inhibition as a Binary Switch for Excitatory Plasticity in Pyramidal Neurons (2016, background): “Recent advances of optogenetic methods allow to shed further light on the computational relevance of interneuron diversity [50, 63, 64, 73] and could—by targeting specific interneuron types—help to reveal whether (and if so which) neurons can regulate plasticity in local circuits.”
Arousal and locomotion make distinct contributions to cortical activity patterns and visual encoding (2014, neutral): “The functional impact of motor feedback signals to sensory cortex is likewise only beginning to be explored (Guo et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2013; Schneider et al., 2014; Zagha et al., 2013).”
Parallel processing by cortical inhibition enables context-dependent behavior (2016, neutral): “These results are consistent with these three interneuron subtypes being sensitive to cholinergic regulation and having strong levels of interconnectivity 6,31,47 .”