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
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
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