Abstract
Several recent studies using either viral or transgenic mouse models have shown different results on whether the activation of parvalbumin-positive (PV+) neurons expressing channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) in the primary visual cortex (V1) improves the orientation- and direction-selectivity of V1 neurons. Although this discrepancy was thoroughly discussed in a follow-up communication, the issue of using different models to express ChR2 in V1 was not mentioned. We found that ChR2 was expressed in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) and V1 neurons in ChR2fl/+; PV-Cre mice. Our results showed that the activation of PV+ RGCs using white drifting gratings alone significantly decreased the firing rates of V1 neurons and improved their direction- and orientation-selectivity. Long-duration activation of PV+ interneurons in V1 further enhanced the feature-selectivity of V1 neurons in anesthetized mice, confirming the conclusions from previous findings. These results suggest that the activation of both PV+ RGCs and V1 neurons improves feature-selectivity in mice.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the grants of National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271158, 31421091, and 31422025), the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality, China (13PJ1401000), the Young 1000 Plan and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2015AA020512).
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Jinggang Duan and Hang Fu have contributed equally to this work.
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Duan, J., Fu, H. & Zhang, J. Activation of Parvalbumin-Positive Neurons in Both Retina and Primary Visual Cortex Improves the Feature-Selectivity of Primary Visual Cortex Neurons. Neurosci. Bull. 33, 255–263 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-016-0096-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-016-0096-8