NMDA spikes mediate amplification of inputs in the rat piriform cortex
- Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
- University of Haifa, Israel
- University of Southern California, United States
- University of Colorado School of Medicine, United States
- Cited 0
- Views 1,280
- Annotations
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.
Article and author information
Author details
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
© 2018, Kumar 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
-
- 1,280
- Page views
-
- 274
- Downloads
-
- 0
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, PubMed Central, Scopus.
