scholarly journals MECP2 regulates cortical plasticity underlying a learned behavior in adult female mice

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keerthi Krishnan ◽  
Billy Lau ◽  
Gabrielle Ewall ◽  
Z. Josh Huang ◽  
Stephen David Shea
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Cortical Plasticity ◽  
Critical Periods ◽  
Learned Behavior ◽  
Pup Retrieval ◽  
Efficient Retrieval ◽  
Inhibitory Plasticity ◽  
Adult Plasticity ◽  
Pharmacological Manipulations

Neurodevelopmental disorders begin with the emergence of inappropriate synaptic connectivity early in life, yet how the sustained disruption of experience-dependent plasticity aggravates symptoms in adulthood is unclear. Here we used pup retrieval learning to assay adult cortical plasticity in a female mouse model of Rett syndrome (MeCP2het). We show that auditory cortical plasticity and retrieval learning are impaired in MeCP2het. Specifically, normal MECP2 expression in the adult auditory cortex is required for efficient retrieval learning. In wild-type mice, cohabitation with a mother and her pups triggered transient changes to auditory cortical inhibitory networks, including elevated levels of the GABA-synthesizing enzyme GAD67. However, MeCP2het further exhibited increased expression of parvalbumin (PV) and perineuronal nets (PNNs), events thought to suppress plasticity at the closure of critical periods and in adult learning. Averting these events with genetic and pharmacological manipulations of the GABAergic network restored retrieval behavior. We propose that adult retrieval learning triggers a transient episode of inhibitory plasticity in the auditory cortex that is dysregulated in MeCP2het. This window of heightened sensitivity to social sensory cues reveals a role of MeCP2 mutations in facilitating adult plasticity that is distinct from their effects on early development.

scholarly journals Late cortical plasticity in motor and auditory cortex: role of met-allele in BDNF Val66Met polymorphism

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (05) ◽  
pp. 705-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
James T. H. Teo ◽  
Graham Bentley ◽  
Philip Lawrence ◽  
Fruzsina Soltesz ◽  
Sam Miller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Cortical Plasticity ◽  
Val66met Polymorphism ◽  
Bdnf Val66met Polymorphism

scholarly journals Neuromodulatory influence of norepinephrine during developmental experience-dependent plasticity

2016 ◽  
Vol 116 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall M. Golovin ◽  
Nicholas J. Ward
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Cortical Plasticity ◽  
Functional Redundancy ◽  
Neuronal Circuits ◽  
Critical Periods ◽  
Dependent Plasticity ◽  
Phases Of Development ◽  
Developmental Experience ◽  
Insight Into

Critical periods represent phases of development during which neuronal circuits and their responses can be readily shaped by stimuli. Experience-dependent plasticity that occurs within these critical periods can be influenced in many ways; however, Shepard et al. ( J Neurosci 35: 2432–2437, 2015) recently singled out norepinephrine as an essential driver of this plasticity within the auditory cortex. This work provides novel insight into the mechanisms of critical period plasticity and challenges previous conceptions that a functional redundancy exists between noradrenergic and cholinergic influences on cortical plasticity.

scholarly journals Receptive field formation by interacting excitatory and inhibitory synaptic plasticity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Clopath ◽  
Tim P. Vogels ◽  
Robert C. Froemke ◽  
Henning Sprekeler
Keyword(s):  
Synaptic Plasticity ◽  
Receptive Field ◽  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Cortical Neurons ◽  
Receptive Fields ◽  
Excitatory Stimulus ◽  
Inhibitory Plasticity ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Adult Plasticity ◽  
Field Formation

AbstractThe stimulus selectivity of synaptic currents in cortical neurons often shows a co-tuning of excitation and inhibition, but the mechanisms that underlie the emergence and plasticity of this co-tuning are not fully understood. Using a computational model, we show that an interaction of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic plasticity reproduces both the developmental and – when combined with a disinhibitory gate – the adult plasticity of excitatory and inhibitory receptive fields in auditory cortex. The co-tuning arises from inhibitory plasticity that balances excitation and inhibition, while excitatory stimulus selectivity can result from two different mechanisms. Inhibitory inputs with a broad stimulus tuning introduce a sliding threshold as in Bienenstock-Cooper-Munro rules, introducing an excitatory stimulus selectivity at the cost of a broader inhibitory receptive field. Alternatively, input asymmetries can be amplified by synaptic competition. The latter leaves any receptive field plasticity transient, a prediction we verify in recordings in auditory cortex.

scholarly journals Reactivation of critical period plasticity in adult auditory cortex through chemogenetic silencing of parvalbumin-positive interneurons

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (52) ◽  
pp. 26329-26331 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Miguel Cisneros-Franco ◽  
Étienne de Villers-Sidani
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Sensory Processing ◽  
Cortical Plasticity ◽  
Cell Activity ◽  
Sound Intensity ◽  
Cortical Inhibition ◽  
Critical Periods ◽  
Cellular Mechanisms ◽  
Perineuronal Net ◽  
Early Developmental

Sensory experience during early developmental critical periods (CPs) has profound and long-lasting effects on cortical sensory processing perduring well into adulthood. Although recent evidence has shown that reducing cortical inhibition during adulthood reinstates CP plasticity, the precise cellular mechanisms are not well understood. Here, we show that chemogenetic inactivation of parvalbumin-positive (PV+) interneurons is sufficient to reinstate CP plasticity in the adult auditory cortex. Bidirectional manipulation of PV+cell activity affected neuronal spectral and sound intensity selectivity and, in the case of PV+interneuron inactivation, was mirrored by anatomical changes in PV and associated perineuronal net expression. These findings underscore the importance of sustained PV-mediated inhibitory neurotransmission throughout life and highlight the potential of chemogenetic approaches for harnessing cortical plasticity with the ultimate goal of aiding recovery from brain injury or disease.

Neural Mechanisms of Music and Language

2019 ◽  
pp. 906-952
Author(s):  
Mattson Ogg ◽  
L. Robert Slevc
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Auditory Processing ◽  
Cortical Plasticity ◽  
Speaker Identification ◽  
Auditory Pathway ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Cortical Regions

Music and language are uniquely human forms of communication. What neural structures facilitate these abilities? This chapter conducts a review of music and language processing that follows these acoustic signals as they ascend the auditory pathway from the brainstem to auditory cortex and on to more specialized cortical regions. Acoustic, neural, and cognitive mechanisms are identified where processing demands from both domains might overlap, with an eye to examples of experience-dependent cortical plasticity, which are taken as strong evidence for common neural substrates. Following an introduction describing how understanding musical processing informs linguistic or auditory processing more generally, findings regarding the major components (and parallels) of music and language research are reviewed: pitch perception, syntax and harmonic structural processing, semantics, timbre and speaker identification, attending in auditory scenes, and rhythm. Overall, the strongest evidence that currently exists for neural overlap (and cross-domain, experience-dependent plasticity) is in the brainstem, followed by auditory cortex, with evidence and the potential for overlap becoming less apparent as the mechanisms involved in music and speech perception become more specialized and distinct at higher levels of processing.

scholarly journals Development-Dependent Plasticity in Vasoactive Intestinal Polypeptide Neurons in the Infralimbic Cortex

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart A Collins ◽  
Ipe Ninan
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Anxiety Disorders ◽  
Vasoactive Intestinal Polypeptide ◽  
Cortical Plasticity ◽  
Male Mice ◽  
Infralimbic Cortex ◽  
Membrane Excitability ◽  
Gabaergic Transmission ◽  
Intestinal Polypeptide

Abstract The onset of several neuropsychiatric disorders including anxiety disorders coincides with adolescence. Consistently, threat extinction, which plays a key role in the regulation of anxiety-related behaviors, is diminished during adolescence. Furthermore, this attenuated threat extinction during adolescence is associated with an altered synaptic plasticity in the infralimbic medial prefrontal cortex (IL-mPFC), a brain region critical for threat extinction. However, the mechanism underlying the altered plasticity in the IL-mPFC during adolescence is unclear. Given the purported role of vasoactive intestinal polypeptide expressing interneurons (VIPINs) in disinhibition and hence their potential to affect cortical plasticity, we examined whether VIPINs exhibit an adolescence-specific plasticity in the IL-mPFC. We observed an increase in GABAergic transmission and a decrease in excitability in VIPINs during adolescence. Male mice show a significantly higher VIPIN-pyramidal neuron GABAergic transmission compared with female mice. The observed increase in GABAergic transmission and a decrease in membrane excitability in VIPINs during adolescence could play a role in the altered plasticity in the adolescent IL-mPFC. Furthermore, the suppression of VIPIN-mediated GABAergic transmission in females might be relevant to sex differences in anxiety disorders.

scholarly journals Role of Mammalian Auditory Cortex in the Perception of Elementary Sound Properties

2001 ◽  
Vol 85 (6) ◽  
pp. 2350-2358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjiv K. Talwar ◽  
Pawel G. Musial ◽  
George L. Gerstein
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Cortex ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Auditory Evoked Potentials ◽  
Mammalian Species ◽  
Sound Intensity ◽  
Primary Auditory Cortex ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Auditory Task ◽  
Experimental Conditions

Studies in several mammalian species have demonstrated that bilateral ablations of the auditory cortex have little effect on simple sound intensity and frequency-based behaviors. In the rat, for example, early experiments have shown that auditory ablations result in virtually no effect on the rat's ability to either detect tones or discriminate frequencies. Such lesion experiments, however, typically examine an animal's performance some time after recovery from ablation surgery. As such, they demonstrate that the cortex is not essential for simple auditory behaviors in the long run. Our study further explores the role of cortex in basic auditory perception by examining whether the cortex is normally involved in these behaviors. In these experiments we reversibly inactivated the rat primary auditory cortex (AI) using the GABA agonist muscimol, while the animals performed a simple auditory task. At the same time we monitored the rat's auditory activity by recording auditory evoked potentials (AEP) from the cortical surface. In contrast to lesion studies, the rapid time course of these experimental conditions preclude reorganization of the auditory system that might otherwise compensate for the loss of cortical processing. Soon after bilateral muscimol application to their AI region, our rats exhibited an acute and profound inability to detect tones. After a few hours this state was followed by a gradual recovery of normal hearing, first of tone detection and, much later, of the ability to discriminate frequencies. Surface muscimol application, at the same time, drastically altered the normal rat AEP. Some of the normal AEP components vanished nearly instantaneously to unveil an underlying waveform, whose size was related to the severity of accompanying behavioral deficits. These results strongly suggest that the cortex is directly involved in basic acoustic processing. Along with observations from accompanying multiunit experiments that related the AEP to AI neuronal activity, our results suggest that a critical amount of activity in the auditory cortex is necessary for normal hearing. It is likely that the involvement of the cortex in simple auditory perceptions has hitherto not been clearly understood because of underlying recovery processes that, in the long-term, safeguard fundamental auditory abilities after cortical injury.

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