Rapid fluctuations in rat barrel cortex plasticity

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
Irina A Erchova, Mathew E Diamond

Abstract

Neuronal populations in the sensory cortex exhibit fluctuations in excitability, and the present experiments tested the hypothesis that these variations coincide with peaks and troughs in cortical modifiability. The activity of multiunit neuronal clusters under light urethane anesthesia was recorded through 100-microelectrode arrays implanted in the infragranular layers of rat barrel cortex. Spontaneous activity was characterized by "bursts" of spikes, synchronized across the barrel cortex. This allowed activity at one selected electrode to be taken as a reliable monitor of widespread cortical bursts. We used spikes at the selected electrode to trigger stimulation of two pairs of whiskers during a 50 min conditioning procedure: (1) for the "burst-conditioned" whisker pair, each stimulus was delivered 1 msec after the triggering spike, activating cortex coincident with the burst; and (2) for the "interburst-conditioned" whisker pair, each stimulus was delivered 300 msec after the triggering spike, activating cortex during the trough between bursts. The cross-correlation between cortical neurons in the pairs of columns matching the stimulated whisker pairs was estimated after the termination of the conditioning procedure. Conditi...Continue Reading

Citations

Sep 29, 2009·Neuroscience Bulletin·Fei Luo, Jin-Yan Wang
Jul 22, 2008·Nature Reviews. Neuroscience·Mathew E DiamondEhud Ahissar
Jan 6, 2007·PloS One·Gabriel D PucciniMiguel Maravall
Feb 27, 2009·The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience·Ayan GhoshalFord Ebner
Jan 22, 2005·PLoS Biology·Ehsan ArabzadehMathew E Diamond
Feb 24, 2007·Hearing Research·M P KilgardP K Pandya
Oct 7, 2015·Frontiers in Neural Circuits·Andrew Y Y Tan
Oct 30, 2007·Neuron·Carl C H Petersen
Aug 15, 2018·Somatosensory & Motor Research·Narjes SoltaniAli Shamsizadeh
May 4, 2017·Somatosensory & Motor Research·Elham MohammadiAli Roohbakhsh

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Here is the latest research on barrel cortex, a region of somatosensory and motor corticies in the brain, which are used by animals that rely on whiskers for world exploration.