PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Michael R. Bale AU - Dario Campagner AU - Andrew Erskine AU - Rasmus S. Petersen TI - Microsecond-Scale Timing Precision in Rodent Trigeminal Primary Afferents AID - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3876-14.2015 DP - 2015 Apr 15 TA - The Journal of Neuroscience PG - 5935--5940 VI - 35 IP - 15 4099 - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/15/5935.short 4100 - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/15/5935.full SO - J. Neurosci.2015 Apr 15; 35 AB - Communication in the nervous system occurs by spikes: the timing precision with which spikes are fired is a fundamental limit on neural information processing. In sensory systems, spike-timing precision is constrained by first-order neurons. We found that spike-timing precision of trigeminal primary afferents in rats and mice is limited both by stimulus speed and by electrophysiological sampling rate. High-speed video of behaving mice revealed whisker velocities of at least 17,000°/s, so we delivered an ultrafast “ping” (>50,000°/s) to single whiskers and sampled primary afferent activity at 500 kHz. Median spike jitter was 17.4 μs; 29% of neurons had spike jitter < 10 μs. These results indicate that the input stage of the trigeminal pathway has extraordinary spike-timing precision and very high potential information capacity. This timing precision ranks among the highest in biology.