A cortical disinhibitory circuit for enhancing adult plasticity

  1. Yu Fu
  2. Megumi Kaneko
  3. Yunshuo Tang
  4. Arturo Alvarez-Buylla
  5. Michael P Stryker  Is a corresponding author
  1. 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.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Yu Fu

    Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Megumi Kaneko

    Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Yunshuo Tang

    Department of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Arturo Alvarez-Buylla

    Department of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Michael P Stryker

    Center for Integrative Neuroscience, Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    For correspondence
    stryker@phy.ucsf.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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.

Copyright

© 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.

Metrics

  • 5,216
    views
  • 1,181
    downloads
  • 168
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Yu Fu
  2. Megumi Kaneko
  3. Yunshuo Tang
  4. Arturo Alvarez-Buylla
  5. Michael P Stryker
(2015)
A cortical disinhibitory circuit for enhancing adult plasticity
eLife 4:e05558.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05558

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05558

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Mohsen Alavash
    Insight

    Combining electrophysiological, anatomical and functional brain maps reveals networks of beta neural activity that align with dopamine uptake.

    1. Neuroscience
    Nicolas Langer, Maurice Weber ... Ce Zhang
    Tools and Resources

    Memory deficits are a hallmark of many different neurological and psychiatric conditions. The Rey–Osterrieth complex figure (ROCF) is the state-of-the-art assessment tool for neuropsychologists across the globe to assess the degree of non-verbal visual memory deterioration. To obtain a score, a trained clinician inspects a patient’s ROCF drawing and quantifies deviations from the original figure. This manual procedure is time-consuming, slow and scores vary depending on the clinician’s experience, motivation, and tiredness. Here, we leverage novel deep learning architectures to automatize the rating of memory deficits. For this, we collected more than 20k hand-drawn ROCF drawings from patients with various neurological and psychiatric disorders as well as healthy participants. Unbiased ground truth ROCF scores were obtained from crowdsourced human intelligence. This dataset was used to train and evaluate a multihead convolutional neural network. The model performs highly unbiased as it yielded predictions very close to the ground truth and the error was similarly distributed around zero. The neural network outperforms both online raters and clinicians. The scoring system can reliably identify and accurately score individual figure elements in previously unseen ROCF drawings, which facilitates explainability of the AI-scoring system. To ensure generalizability and clinical utility, the model performance was successfully replicated in a large independent prospective validation study that was pre-registered prior to data collection. Our AI-powered scoring system provides healthcare institutions worldwide with a digital tool to assess objectively, reliably, and time-efficiently the performance in the ROCF test from hand-drawn images.