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The Journal of Neuroscience, November 15, 1999, 19(22):9756-9767
Functional Circuitry of the Retinal Ganglion Cell's Nonlinear
Receptive Field
Jonathan B.
Demb,
Loren
Haarsma,
Michael A.
Freed, and
Peter
Sterling
Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6058
A retinal ganglion cell commonly expresses two spatially
overlapping receptive field mechanisms. One is the familiar
"center/surround," which sums excitation and inhibition across a
region somewhat broader than the ganglion cell's dendritic field. This
mechanism responds to a drifting grating by modulating firing at the
drift frequency (linear response). Less familiar is the "nonlinear" mechanism, which sums the rectified output of many small subunits that
extend for millimeters beyond the dendritic field. This mechanism responds to a contrast-reversing grating by modulating firing at twice
the reversal frequency (nonlinear response). We investigated this
nonlinear mechanism by presenting visual stimuli to the intact guinea
pig retina in vitro while recording intracellularly from large brisk and sluggish ganglion cells. A contrast-reversing grating
modulated the membrane potential (in addition to the firing rate) at
twice the reversal frequency. This response was initially hyperpolarizing for some cells (either ON or OFF center) and initially depolarizing for others. Experiments in which responses to bars were
summed in-phase or out-of-phase suggested that the single class of
bipolar cells (either ON or OFF) that drives the center/surround response also drives the nonlinear response. Consistent with this, nonlinear responses persisted in OFF ganglion cells when ON bipolar cell responses were blocked by L-AP-4. Nonlinear
responses evoked from millimeters beyond the ganglion cell were
eliminated by tetrodotoxin. Thus, to relay the response from distant
regions of the receptive field requires a spiking interneuron.
Nonlinear responses from different regions of the receptive field added linearly.
Key words:
in vitro retina; guinea pig; nonlinear
subunit; shift effect; spiking amacrine cell; bipolar cell; tetrodotoxin; L-AP-4
Copyright © 1999 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/99/19229756-12$05.00/0
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