Spontaneous and evoked activity patterns diverge over development

Abstract

The immature brain is highly spontaneously active. Over development this activity must be integrated with emerging patterns of stimulus-evoked activity, but little is known about how this occurs. Here we investigated this question by recording spontaneous and evoked neural activity in the larval zebrafish tectum from 4 to 15 days post fertilisation. Correlations within spontaneous and evoked activity epochs were comparable over development, and their neural assemblies properties refined in similar ways. However both the similarity between evoked and spontaneous assemblies, and also the geometric distance between spontaneous and evoked patterns, decreased over development. At all stages of development evoked activity was of higher dimension than spontaneous activity. Thus spontaneous and evoked activity do not converge over development in this system, and these results do not support the hypothesis that spontaneous activity evolves to form a Bayesian prior for evoked activity.

Data availability

The data has been made available on FigShare, under the DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.14402543

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Lilach Avitan

    Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Zac Pujic

    Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Jan Mölter

    Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-5964-6207
  4. Shuyu Zhu

    Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, ST LUCIA, Australia
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3791-8400
  5. Biao Sun

    Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Geoffrey J Goodhill

    Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
    For correspondence
    g.goodhill@uq.edu.au
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9789-9355

Funding

Australian Research Council (DP170102263)

  • Geoffrey J Goodhill

Australian Research Council (DP180100636)

  • Geoffrey J Goodhill

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 performed with approval from The University of Queensland Animal Ethics Committee (QBI/152/16/ARC).

Reviewing Editor

  1. Tatyana O Sharpee, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, United States

Version history

  1. Received: August 10, 2020
  2. Accepted: April 7, 2021
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: April 19, 2021 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: April 26, 2021 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2021, Avitan 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.

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  1. Lilach Avitan
  2. Zac Pujic
  3. Jan Mölter
  4. Shuyu Zhu
  5. Biao Sun
  6. Geoffrey J Goodhill
(2021)
Spontaneous and evoked activity patterns diverge over development
eLife 10:e61942.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.61942

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