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Stimulus Discrimination in Cerebellar Purkinje Neurons

Reusch, Katharina; Russell, Noah A.; Bellamy, Tomas C.

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Authors

Katharina Reusch

Noah A. Russell



Abstract

Cerebellar Purkinje neurons fire spontaneously in the absence of synaptic input. Overlaid on this intrinsic activity, excitatory input from parallel fibres can add simple spikes to the output train, whereas inhibitory input from interneurons can introduce pauses. These and other influences lead to an irregular spike train output in Purkinje neurons in vitro and in vivo, supplying a variable inhibitory drive to deep cerebellar nuclear neurons. From a computational perspective, this variability raises some questions, as individual spikes induced by excitatory inputs are indistinguishable from intrinsic firing activity. Although bursts of high-frequency excitatory input could be discriminated unambiguously from background activity, granule neurons are known to fire in vivo over a wide range of frequencies. This would mean that much of the sensory information relayed through the cerebellar cortex would be lost within the random variation in background activity. We speculated that alternative mechanisms for signal discrimination may exist, and sought to identify characteristic motifs within the sequence of spikes that followed stimulation events. We found that under certain conditions, parallel fibre stimulation could reliably add a “couplet” of spikes with an unusually short interspike interval to the output train. Therefore, despite representing a small fraction of the total number of spikes, these signals can be reliably discriminated from background firing on a moment-to-moment basis, and could result in a differential downstream response.

Citation

Reusch, K., Russell, N. A., & Bellamy, T. C. (2014). Stimulus Discrimination in Cerebellar Purkinje Neurons. PLoS ONE, 9(2), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087828

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 30, 2013
Online Publication Date Feb 5, 2014
Publication Date Feb 5, 2014
Deposit Date Jul 13, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal PLoS ONE
Electronic ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 9
Issue 2
Article Number e87828
DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087828
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1099503
Publisher URL https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0087828
PMID 24505320

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