Oscillatory integration windows in neurons

By Nitin Gupta, S. Singh, Mark Stopfer. 2016

36 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Oscillatory synchrony among neurons occurs in many species and brain areas, and has been proposed to help neural circuits process information. One hypothesis states that oscillatory input creates cyclic integration windows: specific times in each oscillatory cycle when postsynaptic neurons become especially responsive to inputs. With paired local field potential (LFP) and intracellular recordings and controlled stimulus manipulations we directly test this idea in the locust olfactory system. We find that inputs arriving in Kenyon cells (KCs) sum most effectively in a preferred window of the oscillation cycle. With a computational model, we show that the non-uniform structure of noise in the membrane potential helps mediate this process. Further experiments performed in vivo demonstrate that integration windows can form in the absence of inhibition and at a broad range of oscillation frequencies. Our results reveal how a fundamental coincidence-detection mechanism in a neural circuit functions to decode temporally organized spiking. Neural oscillations have been proposed to process information by generating cyclic integration windows: specific portions of the oscillatory cycle when a post-synaptic neuron is especially sensitive to coincident inputs. Here, the authors demonstrate the existence and mechanism of integration windows in Kenyon cells in the locust olfactory system.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems

Citations in the corpus

• Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, neutral): “Upon odour stimulation, locust projection neurons form transiently synchronized ensembles, creating short integration windows for Kenyon cells and causing them to act as coincidence detectors (Perez-Orive et al., 2002; Gupta et al., 2016).”