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Volume 17, Number 20,
Issue of October 15, 1997
pp. 7926-7940
Copyright ©1997 Society for Neuroscience
A Quantitative Description of Short-Term Plasticity at Excitatory
Synapses in Layer 2/3 of Rat Primary Visual Cortex
Received June 20, 1997; revised July 22, 1997; accepted July 24, 1997.
Juan A. Varela,
Kamal Sen,
Jay Gibson,
Joshua Fost,
L. F. Abbott, and
Sacha B. Nelson
Department of Biology and Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis
University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02254
Cortical synapses exhibit several forms of short-term plasticity,
but the contribution of this plasticity to visual response dynamics is
unknown. In part, this is because the simple patterns of stimulation
used to probe plasticity in vitro do not correspond to
patterns of activity that occur in vivo. We have
developed a method of quantitatively characterizing short-term
plasticity at cortical synapses that permits prediction of responses to
arbitrary patterns of stimulation. Synaptic responses were recorded
intracellularly as EPSCs and extracellularly as local field potentials
in layer 2/3 of rat primary visual cortical slices during stimulation
of layer 4 with trains of electrical stimuli containing random mixtures of frequencies. Responses exhibited complex dynamics that were well
described by a simple three-component model consisting of facilitation
and two forms of depression, a stronger form that decayed exponentially
with a time constant of several hundred milliseconds and a weaker, but
more persistent, form that decayed with a time constant of several
seconds. Parameters obtained from fits to one train were used to
predict accurately responses to other random and constant frequency
trains. Control experiments revealed that depression was not caused by
a decrease in the effectiveness of extracellular stimulation or by a
buildup of inhibition. Pharmacological manipulations of transmitter
release and postsynaptic sensitivity suggested that both forms of
depression are mediated presynaptically. These results indicate that
firing evoked by visual stimuli is likely to cause significant
depression at cortical synapses. Hence synaptic depression may be an
important determinant of the temporal features of visual cortical
responses.
Key words:
facilitation;
depression;
temporal integration;
temporal
filtering;
contrast adaptation;
presynaptic;
neocortex;
nonlinearity;
EPSC;
field potential
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