Neural coding of interneuron populations in the retina

视网膜中间神经元群的神经编码

• 批准号: 8810457
• 负责人: STEPHEN A BACCUS
• 金额: $ 39.91万
• 依托单位: STANFORD UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-01 至 2019-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8810457
• 关键词: Address; Age related macular degeneration; Amacrine Cells; Anatomy; Back; Behavior; Brain; Cells; Code; Complex; Disease; Electrodes; Electronics; Eye Movements; Goals; Image; Individual; Interneurons; Knowledge; Measurement; Measures; Motion; Neurons; Optics; Output; Perception; Physiological; Physiology; Play; Population; Population Heterogeneity; Property; Prosthesis; Research; Resolution; Retina; Retinal; Retinal Diseases; Retinal Ganglion Cells; Retinitis Pigmentosa; Role; Sensory; Shapes; Signal Transduction; Stimulus; Synapses; System; Testing; Variant; Vision; Visual; Visual Motion; Work; cell type; ganglion cell; inhibitory neuron; luminance; neural circuit; novel; novel strategies; optical imaging; photoreceptor degeneration; public health relevance; receptive field; relating to nervous system; research study; response; retinal prosthesis; sensory input; statistics; therapy design; visual information; visual stimulus

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Like many neural circuits of the brain, the retina is composed of a network of cells with greatly varying anatomical and physiological properties. The most diverse types of cells, both in the retina and cortex, are inhibitory interneurons. Retina amacrine cells comprise over thirty types and influence the responses of ganglion cells, the output cells of the retina. Although the anatomy and physiology of amacrine cells have long been studied, there is little understanding as to whether they have specific and distinct roles, rather than each serving a similar, general function. A substantial barrier to the understanding of inhibitory interneurons has been technical limitations on studying single cells among a diverse population. This proposal seeks to characterize the population of inhibitory amacrine cells using a novel approach to optically record the visual responses of the amacrine cell population while simultaneously recording populations of ganglion cells using an electrode array. This project focuses on responses to moving visual stimuli, which are ecologically important and critical to behavior and perception. The first aim of this proposal will measure the responses of a nearly complete amacrine population to moving stimuli and compare these with simultaneously recorded responses in the ganglion cell population. By measuring the similarity in responses between amacrine and ganglion cell populations, these experiments will test the hypothesis that amacrine cells are divided into two broad classes: one that resembles the more simple bipolar cell representation and one that is more tightly correlated with specific retinal ganglion cells. Te second aim of this proposal uses optical imaging and simultaneous intracellular and multielectrode recording to test the hypothesis that amacrine cells inhibit ganglion cells that the are correlated with under visual motion, despite the wide variation of preferred visual stimuli across amacrine cells. Finally, the third aim of this proposal will take advantage of our novel approach of directly perturbing individual interneurons intracellularly to test whether many types of amacrine cells act to reduce correlations in the ganglion cell population for different types of natural stimuli, thus creating an efficient representation of the visual scene. These studies will not only add to the knowledge of how an inhibitory population represents and transforms visual information, but will also test general principles applicable to all neural circuits. The results wll have immediate applicability to the emerging field of retinal prostheses. The objective of a retinal prosthesis system is to treat prevalent diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa by replacing the function of the damaged retina with a high-resolution electronic circuit. Measurements of the retinal neural code and the computations that are performed will be directly useful for incorporation into these prostheses systems.

描述（由申请人提供）：像大脑的许多神经回路一样，视网膜是由具有很大不同解剖和生理特性的细胞网络组成的。视网膜和皮层中最多样化的细胞类型是抑制性中间神经元。视网膜无突细胞包括三十多种类型，影响神经节细胞的反应，神经节细胞是视网膜的输出细胞。虽然无毛细胞的解剖学和生理学研究已经进行了很长时间，但人们对它们是否具有特定和不同的作用知之甚少，而不是每个细胞都具有相似的一般功能。理解的实质性障碍