A cortical disinhibitory circuit for enhancing adult plasticity
- University of California, San Francisco, United States
Abstract
The adult brain continues to learn and can recover from injury, but the elements and operation of the neural circuits responsible for this plasticity are not known. In previous work we have: shown that locomotion dramatically enhances neural activity in the visual cortex (V1) of the mouse (Neill and Stryker, 2010); identified the cortical circuit responsible for this enhancement (Fu et al., 2014); and shown that locomotion also dramatically enhances adult plasticity (Kaneko and Stryker, 2014). The circuit responsible that is responsible for enhancing neural activity in the visual cortex contains both vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) and somatostatin (SST) neurons (Fu et al., 2014). Here we ask whether this VIP-SST circuit enhances plasticity directly, independent of locomotion and aerobic activity. Optogenetic activation or genetic blockade of this circuit reveal that it is both necessary and sufficient for rapidly increasing V1 cortical responses following manipulation of visual experience in adult mice. These findings reveal a disinhibitory circuit that regulates adult cortical plasticity.
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Ethics
Animal experimentation: Mice were maintained in the Laboratory Animal Research Center at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and used in accordance with protocol AN098080-02A-G approved by the UCSF Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
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© 2015, Fu et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A cortical disinhibitory circuit for enhancing adult plasticity
eLife 4:e05558.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05558
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