Sparse activity of identified dentate granule cells during spatial exploration
- Werner-Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Germany
Abstract
In the dentate gyrus - a key component of spatial memory circuits - granule cells (GCs) are known to be morphologically diverse and to display heterogeneous activity profiles during behavior. To resolve structure-function relationships, we juxtacellularly recorded and labeled single GCs in freely-moving rats. We found that the vast majority of neurons were silent during exploration. Most active GCs displayed a characteristic spike waveform, fired at low rates and showed spatial activity. Primary dendritic parameters were sufficient for classifying neurons as active or silent with high accuracy. Our data thus support a sparse coding scheme in the dentate gyrus and provide a possible link between structural and functional heterogeneity among the GC population.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (EXC 307)
- Maria Diamantaki
- Markus Frey
- Philipp Berens
- Patricia Preston-Ferrer
- Andrea Burgalossi
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (FKZ 01GQ1601)
- Philipp Berens
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were performed according to the German guidelines on animal welfare and approved by the local institution in charge of experiments using animals (Regierungspraesidium Tuebingen, permit numbers CIN2/14, CIN/5/14 and CIN/814).
Copyright
© 2016, Diamantaki 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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Sparse activity of identified dentate granule cells during spatial exploration
eLife 5:e20252.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20252
