Synaptic Contributions to Receptive Field Structure and Response Properties in the Rodent Lateral Geniculate Nucleus of the Thalamus.

Suresh, Vandana; Çiftçioğlu, Ulaş M.; Xin Wang; Lala, Brittany M.; Ding, Kimberly R.; Smith, William A.; Sommer, Friedrich T.; Hirsch, Judith A.

Comparative physiological and anatomical studies have greatly advanced our understanding of sensory systems. Many lines of evidence show that the murine lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) has unique attributes, compared with other species such as cat and monkey. For example, in rodent, thalamic receptive field structure is markedly diverse, and many cells are sensitive to stimulus orientation and direction. To explore shared and different strategies of synaptic integration across species, we made whole-cell recordings in vivo from the murine LGN during the presentation of visual stimuli, analyzed the results with different computational approaches, and compared our findings with those from cat. As for carnivores, murine cells with classical center-surround receptive fields had a "push-pull" structure of excitation and inhibition within a given On or Off subregion. These cells compose the largest single population in the murine LGN (~40%), indicating that push-pull is key in the form vision pathway across species. For two cell types with overlapping On and Off responses, which recalled either W3 or suppressed-by-contrast ganglion cells in murine retina, inhibition took a different form and was most pronounced for spatially extensive stimuli. Other On-Off cells were selective for stimulus orientation and direction. In these cases, retinal inputs were tuned and, for oriented cells, the second-order subunit of the receptive field predicted the preferred angle. By contrast, suppression was not tuned and appeared to sharpen stimulus selectivity. Together, our results provide new perspectives on the role of excitation and inhibition in retinothalamic processing.

SENSE organs; LATERAL geniculate body; RECEPTIVE fields (Neurology); SENSORY stimulation; RETINAL ganglion cells

Journal of Neuroscience, 2016, Vol 36, Issue 43, p10949

0270-6474

Academic Journal

10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1045-16.2016