Feedforward motor information enhances somatosensory responses and sharpens angular tuning of rat S1 barrel cortex neurons

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Cite this article as: eLife 2017;6:e21843 doi: 10.7554/eLife.21843

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Abstract

The primary vibrissae motor cortex (vM1) is responsible for generating whisking movements. In parallel, vM1 also sends information directly to the sensory barrel cortex (vS1). In this study, we investigated the effects of vM1 activation on processing of vibrissae sensory information in vS1 of the rat. To dissociate the vibrissae sensory-motor loop we optogenetically-activated vM1 and independently passively stimulated principal vibrissae. Optogenetic activation of vM1 supra-linearly amplified the response of vS1 neurons to passive vibrissa stimulation in all cortical layers measured. Maximal amplification occurred when onset of vM1 optogenetic activation preceded vibrissa stimulation by 20 milliseconds. In addition to amplification, vM1 activation also sharpened angular tuning of vS1 neurons in all cortical layers measured. Our findings indicated that in addition to output motor signals, vM1 also sends preparatory signals to vS1 that serve to amplify and sharpen the response of neurons in the barrel cortex to incoming sensory input signals.

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Author details

Mohamed Khateb

The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Jackie Schiller

The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Yitzhak Schiller

The Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

For correspondence
y_schiller@yahoo.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6106-4580

Funding

Israel Science Foundation

Jackie Schiller

Adelis Foundation

Yitzhak Schiller

Prince Neurodegeneration Center

Yitzhak Schiller

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols of the technion.(protocol 007-01-2014) All surgery and experiments were performed under sodium urethane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.

Reviewing Editor

Sacha B Nelson, Brandeis University, United States

Publication history

Received: September 25, 2016
Accepted: January 5, 2017
Accepted Manuscript published: January 6, 2017 (version 1)
Version of Record published: January 27, 2017 (version 2)

Copyright

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.