Dense, Unspecific Connectivity of Neocortical Parvalbumin-Positive Interneurons: A Canonical Microcircuit for Inhibition?

By Adam Packer, Rafael Yuste. 2011

510 citations recorded by the source corpus.

GABAergic interneurons play a major role in the function of the mammalian neocortex, but their circuit connectivity is still poorly understood. We used two-photon RuBi-Glutamate uncaging to optically map how the largest population of cortical interneurons, the parvalbumin-positive cells (PV+), are connected to pyramidal cells (PCs) in mouse neocortex. We found locally dense connectivity from PV+ interneurons onto PCs across cortical areas and layers. In many experiments, all nearby PV+ cells were connected to every local PC sampled. In agreement with this, we found no evidence for connection specificity, as PV+ interneurons contacted PC pairs similarly regardless of whether they were synaptically connected or not. We conclude that the microcircuit architecture for PV+ interneurons, and probably neocortical inhibition in general, is an unspecific, densely homogenous matrix covering all nearby pyramidal cells.

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

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Citations in the corpus

How Inhibition Shapes Cortical Activity (2011, unknown): “…within $100 mm and receive excitatory input from a large fraction of them (Ali et al., 1999; Fino and Yuste, 2011; Glickfeld et al., 2008; Holmgren et al., 2003; Kapfer et al., 2007; Packer and Yuste, 2011; Silberberg and Markram, 2007; Stokes and Isaacson, 2010; Yoshimura and Callaway, 2005).”
Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry. (2015, unknown): “…and Systems Lab, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 17Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK 18Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm 17177, Sweden 19Co-first author 20Co-senior author *Correspondence: henry.markram@epfl.ch http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.09.029”
Dendritic spines and distributed circuits. (2011, unknown): “Consistent with this, the connectivity profiles of inhibitory circuits show that inhibitory neurons connect promiscuously to all local pyramidal cells, passing to each of them the same exact functional signals (Fino and Yuste, 2011; Packer and Yuste, 2011).”
Parvalbumin-expressing interneurons linearly control olfactory bulb output (2013, unknown): “However, individual cortical inhibitory neurons inhibit >50% of local excitatory neurons and receive excitatory input from a large fraction of them (Fino and Yuste, 2011; Packer and Yuste, 2011; Yoshimura and Callaway, 2005).”
Structured Connectivity in Cerebellar Inhibitory Networks (2014, background): “In the cerebellum, synchrony between MLIs (Mann-Metzer and Yarom, 1999) may be restricted to sagittal bands where electrical clustering is high.”
Emergence of Dynamic Memory Traces in Cortical Microcircuit Models through STDP (2013, result): “The power and precision of lateral inhibition among pyramidal cells in superficial and deep layers of cortical columns has been confirmed through a large number of experimental studies (Okun and Lampl, 2008; Ecker et al., 2010; Gentet et al., 2010; Fino and Yuste, 2011; Isaacson and Scanziani, 2011;”
Rapid homeostasis by disinhibition during whisker map plasticity (2014, background): “Second, because inhibitory neurons innervate nearly all local pyramidal cells (50, 51), decreased excitatory drive to a few interneurons may regulate an entire local network uniformly.”
Burst-dependent synaptic plasticity can coordinate learning in hierarchical circuits (2020, methodology): “• Perisomatic inhibition We modeled parvalbumin-positive neurons [120] using the AdEx model 514 with parameters chosen to reproduce qualitatively their typical fast-spiking phenotype.”