Laminar-specific cortico-cortical loops in mouse visual cortex

  1. Hedi Young
  2. Beatriz Belbut
  3. Margarida Baeta
  4. Leopoldo Petreanu  Is a corresponding author
  1. Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Portugal

Abstract

Many theories propose recurrent interactions across the cortical hierarchy, but it is unclear if cortical circuits are selectively wired to implement looped computations. Using subcellular channelrhodopsin-2-assisted circuit mapping in mouse visual cortex, we compared feedforward (FF) or feedback (FB) cortico-cortical synaptic input to cells projecting back to the input source (looped neurons) with cells projecting to a different cortical or subcortical area. FF and FB afferents showed similar cell-type selectivity, making stronger connections with looped neurons than with other projection types in layer (L) 5 and L6, but not in L2/3, resulting in selective modulation of activity in looped neurons. In most cases, stronger connections in looped L5 neurons were located on their apical tufts, but not on their perisomatic dendrites. Our results reveal that cortico-cortical connections are selectively wired to form monosynaptic excitatory loops and support a differential role of supragranular and infragranular neurons in hierarchical recurrent computations.

Data availability

All data is publicly available on Dryad https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1ns1rn8r7

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Hedi Young

    Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lisbon, Portugal
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Beatriz Belbut

    Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lisbon, Portugal
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0341-0585
  3. Margarida Baeta

    Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lisbon, Portugal
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Leopoldo Petreanu

    Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Center for the Unknown, Lisbon, Portugal
    For correspondence
    leopoldo.petreanu@neuro.fchampalimaud.org
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1434-4691

Funding

La Caixa Banking Foundation (LCF/PR/HR17/52150005)

  • Leopoldo Petreanu

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER 030328)

  • Leopoldo Petreanu

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Congento LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-022170)

  • Hedi Young
  • Beatriz Belbut
  • Margarida Baeta
  • Leopoldo Petreanu

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 procedures were reviewed and performed in accordance with the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown Ethics Committee and approved by the Portuguese Veterinary General Direction.(Ref.No.0421/000/000/2019)

Copyright

© 2021, Young 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

  • 4,877
    views
  • 662
    downloads
  • 45
    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)

  1. Hedi Young
  2. Beatriz Belbut
  3. Margarida Baeta
  4. Leopoldo Petreanu
(2021)
Laminar-specific cortico-cortical loops in mouse visual cortex
eLife 10:e59551.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.59551

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.59551

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Georgin Jacob, RT Pramod, SP Arun
    Research Article

    Most visual tasks involve looking for specific object features. But we also often perform property-based tasks where we look for specific property in an image, such as finding an odd item, deciding if two items are same, or if an object has symmetry. How do we solve such tasks? These tasks do not fit into standard models of decision making because their underlying feature space and decision process is unclear. Using well-known principles governing multiple object representations, we show that displays with repeating elements can be distinguished from heterogeneous displays using a property we define as visual homogeneity. In behavior, visual homogeneity predicted response times on visual search, same-different and symmetry tasks. Brain imaging during visual search and symmetry tasks revealed that visual homogeneity was localized to a region in the object-selective cortex. Thus, property-based visual tasks are solved in a localized region in the brain by computing visual homogeneity.

    1. Neuroscience
    François Kroll, Joshua Donnelly ... Jason Rihel
    Research Article

    By exposing genes associated with disease, genomic studies provide hundreds of starting points that should lead to druggable processes. However, our ability to systematically translate these genomic findings into biological pathways remains limited. Here, we combine rapid loss-of-function mutagenesis of Alzheimer’s risk genes and behavioural pharmacology in zebrafish to predict disrupted processes and candidate therapeutics. FramebyFrame, our expanded package for the analysis of larval behaviours, revealed that decreased night-time sleep was common to F0 knockouts of all four late-onset Alzheimer’s risk genes tested. We developed an online tool, ZOLTAR, which compares any behavioural fingerprint to a library of fingerprints from larvae treated with 3677 compounds. ZOLTAR successfully predicted that sorl1 mutants have disrupted serotonin signalling and identified betamethasone as a drug which normalises the excessive day-time sleep of presenilin-2 knockout larvae with minimal side effects. Predictive behavioural pharmacology offers a general framework to rapidly link disease-associated genes to druggable pathways.