NMDA spikes mediate amplification of inputs in the rat piriform cortex

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Cite this article as: eLife 2018;7:e38446 doi: 10.7554/eLife.38446

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Abstract

The piriform cortex (PCx) receives direct input from the olfactory bulb (OB) and is the brain's main station for odor recognition and memory. The transformation of the odor code from OB to PCx is profound: mitral and tufted cells in olfactory glomeruli respond to individual odorant molecules, whereas pyramidal neurons (PNs) in the PCx responds to multiple, apparently random combinations of activated glomeruli. How these 'discontinuous' receptive fields are formed from OB inputs remains unknown. Counter to the prevailing view that olfactory PNs sum their inputs passively, we show for the first time that NMDA spikes within individual dendrites can both amplify OB inputs and impose combination selectivity upon them, while their ability to compartmentalize voltage signals allows different dendrites to represent different odorant combinations. Thus, the 2-layer integrative behavior of olfactory PN dendrites provides a parsimonious account for the nonlinear remapping of the odor code from bulb to cortex.

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Amit Kumar

Department of Physiology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0674-3641
Oded Schiff

Department of Physiology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Edi Barkai

Department of Neurobiology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7325-4269
Bartlett W Mel

Biomedical Engineering Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States

For correspondence
mel@usc.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Alon Poleg-Polsky

Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, United States

For correspondence
ALON.POLEG-POLSKY@UCDENVER.EDU

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1327-5129
Jackie Schiller

Department of Physiology, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

For correspondence
jackie@technion.ac.il

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9182-7166

Funding

Israeli Science Foundation

Jackie 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: All animal procedures were in accordance with guidelines established by the NIH on the care and use of animals in research and were confirmed by the Technion Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IL-012-01-18, valid until 10/4/2022).

Reviewing Editor

Naoshige Uchida, Harvard University, United States

Publication history

Received: May 18, 2018
Accepted: December 20, 2018
Accepted Manuscript published: December 21, 2018 (version 1)
Version of Record published: January 15, 2019 (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.