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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 3, 2007, 27(40):10651-10658; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1320-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Modulation of the Receptive Fields of Midbrain Neurons Elicited by Thalamic Electrical Stimulation through Corticofugal Feedback

Yamin Wu and Jun Yan

Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1

Correspondence should be addressed to Jun Yan, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive Northwest, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1. Email: juyan{at}ucalgary.ca

The ascending and descending projections of the central auditory system form multiple tonotopic loops. This study specifically examines the tonotopic pathway from the auditory thalamus to the auditory cortex and then to the auditory midbrain in mice. We observed the changes of receptive fields in the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus of the midbrain evoked by focal electrical stimulation of the ventral division of the medial geniculate body of the thalamus. The receptive field of an auditory neuron was characterized by five parameters: the best frequency, minimum threshold, bandwidth, size of receptive field, and average spike number. We found that focal thalamic stimulation changed the parametric values characterizing the recorded collicular receptive fields toward those characterizing the stimulated thalamic receptive fields. Cortical inactivation with muscimol prevented the development of the collicular plasticity induced by focal thalamic stimulation. Our data suggest that the intact colliculo-thalamo-cortico-collicular loops are important for the coordination of sound-guided plasticity in the central auditory system.

Key words: auditory; thalamocortical; corticocollicular; neural plasticity; descending system; mouse

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Received March 23, 2007; revised July 8, 2007; accepted Aug. 13, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Jun Yan, Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary, 3330 Hospital Drive Northwest, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 4N1. Email: juyan{at}ucalgary.ca

This article has been cited by other articles:

				N. A. Lesica and B. Grothe Dynamic Spectrotemporal Feature Selectivity in the Auditory Midbrain J. Neurosci., May 21, 2008; 28(21): 5412 - 5421. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				N. Suga The neural circuit for tone-specific plasticity in the auditory system elicited by conditioning Learn. Mem., March 20, 2008; 15(4): 198 - 201. [Full Text] [PDF]

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