Short-term plasticity at cerebellar granule cell to molecular layer interneuron synapses expands information processing
Abstract
Information processing by cerebellar molecular layer interneurons (MLIs) plays a crucial role in motor behavior. MLI recruitment is tightly controlled by the profile of short-term plasticity (STP) at granule cell (GC)-MLI synapses. While GCs are the most numerous neurons in the brain, STP diversity at GC-MLI synapses is poorly documented. Here, we studied how single MLIs are recruited by their distinct GC inputs during burst firing. Using slice recordings at individual GC-MLI synapses of mice, we revealed four classes of connections segregated by their STP profile. Each class differentially drives MLI recruitment. We show that GC synaptic diversity is underlain by heterogeneous expression of synapsin II, a key actor of STP and that GC terminals devoid of synapsin II are associated with slow MLI recruitment. Our study reveals that molecular, structural and functional diversity across GC terminals provides a mechanism to expand the coding range of MLIs.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-2015CeMod)
- Philippe Isope
Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (DEQ20140329514)
- Philippe Isope
Ministère de l'Education Nationale, de l'Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche
- Kevin Dorgans
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 carried out in strict accordance with the national and international laws for laboratory animal welfare and experimentation and was approved in advance by the Ethics Committee of Strasbourg (CREMEAS; CEEA35; agreement number/reference protocol: APAFIS#4354-20 16030212155187 v3).
Copyright
© 2019, Dorgans 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
-
- 2,411
- views
-
- 402
- downloads
-
- 27
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
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)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
The brain is organized into systems and networks of interacting components. The functional connections among these components give insight into the brain's organization and may underlie some cognitive effects of aging. Examining the relationship between individual differences in brain organization and cognitive function in older adults who have reached oldest old ages with healthy cognition can help us understand how these networks support healthy cognitive aging. We investigated functional network segregation in 146 cognitively healthy participants aged 85+ in the McKnight Brain Aging Registry. We found that the segregation of the association system and the individual networks within the association system [the fronto-parietal network (FPN), cingulo-opercular network (CON) and default mode network (DMN)], has strong associations with overall cognition and processing speed. We also provide a healthy oldest-old (85+) cortical parcellation that can be used in future work in this age group. This study shows that network segregation of the oldest-old brain is closely linked to cognitive performance. This work adds to the growing body of knowledge about differentiation in the aged brain by demonstrating that cognitive ability is associated with differentiated functional networks in very old individuals representing successful cognitive aging.
-
- Neuroscience
This study examines whether auditory cortex anatomy reflects multilingual experience, specifically individuals’ phonological repertoire. Using data from over 200 participants exposed to 1–7 languages across 36 languages, we analyzed the role of language experience and typological distances between languages they spoke in shaping neural signatures of multilingualism. Our findings reveal a negative relationship between the thickness of the left and right second transverse temporal gyrus (TTG) and participants’ degree of multilingualism. Models incorporating phoneme-level information in the language experience index explained the most variance in TTG thickness, suggesting that a more extensive and more phonologically diverse language experience is associated with thinner cortices in the second TTG. This pattern, consistent across two datasets, supports the idea of experience-driven pruning and neural efficiency. Our findings indicate that experience with typologically distant languages appear to impact the brain differently than those with similar languages. Moreover, they suggest that early auditory regions seem to represent phoneme-level cross-linguistic information, contrary to the most established models of language processing in the brain, which suggest that phonological processing happens in more lateral posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) and superior temporal sulcus (STS).