Potentiation of cerebellar Purkinje cells facilitates whisker reflex adaptation through increased simple spike activity
- Erasmus Medical Center, Netherlands
- University of Pavia, Italy
Abstract
Cerebellar plasticity underlies motor learning. However, how the cerebellum operates to enable learned changes in motor output is largely unknown. We developed a sensory-driven adaptation protocol for reflexive whisker protraction and recorded Purkinje cell activity from crus 1 and 2 of awake mice. Before training, simple spikes of individual Purkinje cells correlated during reflexive protraction with the whisker position without lead or lag. After training, simple spikes and whisker protractions were both enhanced with the spiking activity now leading behavioral responses. Neuronal and behavioral changes did not occur in two cell-specific mouse models with impaired long-term potentiation at their parallel fiber to Purkinje cell synapses. Consistent with cerebellar plasticity rules, increased simple spike activity was prominent in cells with low complex spike response probability. Thus, potentiation at parallel fiber to Purkinje cell synapses may contribute to reflex adaptation and enable expression of cerebellar learning through increases in simple spike activity.
Data availability
Source data files for all box plots are provided, i.e. for Figures 3, 5 and 8 and for Figure supplements 1-S2, 5-S1, 5-S2, 5-S3, 5-S4, 8-S1 and 8-S2.
Article and author information
Author details
Michiel Manuel ten Brinke
Funding
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (ALW)
- Chris I De Zeeuw
ZonMw
- Chris I De Zeeuw
European Research Council (ERC-Advanced Grant)
- Chris I De Zeeuw
European Research Council (ERC-PoC)
- Chris I De Zeeuw
China Scholarship Council (2010623033)
- Chiheng Ju
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 approved a priori by an independent animal ethical committee (DEC-Consult, Soest, The Netherlands) as required by Dutch law and conform the relevant institutional regulations of the Erasmus MC and Dutch legislation on animal experimentation. Permissions were obtained under the following license numbers: EMC2656, EMC2933, EMC2998, EMC3001, EMC3168 and AVD101002015273.
Copyright
© 2018, Romano 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
-
- 2,522
- views
-
- 378
- downloads
-
- 48
- 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)
Potentiation of cerebellar Purkinje cells facilitates whisker reflex adaptation through increased simple spike activity
eLife 7:e38852.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38852
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Modern neurophysiological recordings are performed using multichannel sensor arrays that are able to record activity in an increasingly high number of channels numbering in the 100s to 1000s. Often, underlying lower-dimensional patterns of activity are responsible for the observed dynamics, but these representations are difficult to reliably identify using existing methods that attempt to summarize multivariate relationships in a post hoc manner from univariate analyses or using current blind source separation methods. While such methods can reveal appealing patterns of activity, determining the number of components to include, assessing their statistical significance, and interpreting them requires extensive manual intervention and subjective judgment in practice. These difficulties with component selection and interpretation occur in large part because these methods lack a generative model for the underlying spatio-temporal dynamics. Here, we describe a novel component analysis method anchored by a generative model where each source is described by a bio-physically inspired state-space representation. The parameters governing this representation readily capture the oscillatory temporal dynamics of the components, so we refer to it as oscillation component analysis. These parameters – the oscillatory properties, the component mixing weights at the sensors, and the number of oscillations – all are inferred in a data-driven fashion within a Bayesian framework employing an instance of the expectation maximization algorithm. We analyze high-dimensional electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography recordings from human studies to illustrate the potential utility of this method for neuroscience data.
-
- Neuroscience
A neural signature of serial dependence has been found, which mirrors the attractive bias of visual information seen in behavioral experiments.
