Survivors of preterm birth are at high risk of pervasive cognitive and learning impairments, suggesting disrupted early brain development. The limits of viability for preterm birth encompass the third trimester of pregnancy, a "precritical period" of activity-dependent development characterized by the onset of spontaneous and evoked patterned electrical activity that drives neuronal maturation and formation of cortical circuits. Reduced background activity on electroencephalogram (EEG) is a sensitive marker of brain injury in human preterm infants that predicts poor neurodevelopmental outcome. We studied a rodent model of very early hypoxic-ischemic brain injury to investigate effects of injury on both general background and specific patterns of cortical activity measured with EEG. EEG background activity is depressed transiently after moderate hypoxia-ischemia with associated loss of spindle bursts. Depressed activity, in turn, is associated with delayed expression of glutamate receptor subunits and transporters. Cortical pyramidal neurons show reduced dendrite development and spine formation. Complementing previous observations in this model of impaired visual cortical plasticity, we find reduced somatosensory whisker barrel plasticity. Finally, EEG recordings from human premature newborns with brain injury demonstrate similar depressed background activity and loss of bursts in the spindle frequency band. Together, these findings suggest that abnormal development after early brain injury may result in part from disruption of specific forms of brain activity necessary for activity-dependent circuit development.

To understand how the neocortex underlies our ability to perceive, think, and act, it is important to study the relationship between circuit connectivity and function. Previous research has shown that excitatory neurons in layer 2/3 of the primary visual cortex of mice with similar response properties are more likely to form connections. However, technical challenges of combining synaptic connectivity and functional measurements have limited these studies to few, highly local connections. Utilizing the millimeter scale and nanometer resolution of the MICrONS dataset, we studied the connectivity-function relationship in excitatory neurons of the mouse visual cortex across interlaminar and interarea projections, assessing connection selectivity at the coarse axon trajectory and fine synaptic formation levels. A digital twin model of this mouse, that accurately predicted responses to arbitrary video stimuli, enabled a comprehensive characterization of the function of neurons. We found that neurons with highly correlated responses to natural videos tended to be connected with each other, not only within the same cortical area but also across multiple layers and visual areas, including feedforward and feedback connections, whereas we did not find that orientation preference predicted connectivity. The digital twin model separated each neuron's tuning into a feature component (what the neuron responds to) and a spatial component (where the neuron's receptive field is located). We show that the feature, but not the spatial component, predicted which neurons were connected at the fine synaptic scale. Together, our results demonstrate the "like-to-like" connectivity rule generalizes to multiple connection types, and the rich MICrONS dataset is suitable to further refine a mechanistic understanding of circuit structure and function.

We are now in the era of millimeter-scale electron microscopy (EM) volumes collected at nanometer resolution. Dense reconstruction of cellular compartments in these EM volumes has been enabled by recent advances in Machine Learning (ML). Automated segmentation methods can now yield exceptionally accurate reconstructions of cells, but despite this accuracy, laborious post-hoc proofreading is still required to generate large connectomes free of merge and split errors. The elaborate 3-D meshes of neurons produced by these segmentations contain detailed morphological information, from the diameter, shape, and branching patterns of axons and dendrites, down to the fine-scale structure of dendritic spines. However, extracting information about these features can require substantial effort to piece together existing tools into custom workflows. Building on existing open-source software for mesh manipulation, here we present "NEURD", a software package that decomposes each meshed neuron into a compact and extensively-annotated graph representation. With these feature-rich graphs, we implement workflows for state-of-the art automated post-hoc proofreading of merge errors, cell classification, spine detection, axon-dendritic proximities, and other features that can enable many downstream analyses of neural morphology and connectivity. NEURD can make these new massive and complex datasets more accessible to neuroscience researchers focused on a variety of scientific questions.

A key role of sensory processing is integrating information across space. Neuronal responses in the visual system are influenced by both local features in the receptive field center and contextual information from the surround. While center-surround interactions have been extensively studied using simple stimuli like gratings, investigating these interactions with more complex, ecologically-relevant stimuli is challenging due to the high dimensionality of the stimulus space. We used large-scale neuronal recordings in mouse primary visual cortex to train convolutional neural network (CNN) models that accurately predicted center-surround interactions for natural stimuli. These models enabled us to synthesize surround stimuli that strongly suppressed or enhanced neuronal responses to the optimal center stimulus, as confirmed by in vivo experiments. In contrast to the common notion that congruent center and surround stimuli are suppressive, we found that excitatory surrounds appeared to complete spatial patterns in the center, while inhibitory surrounds disrupted them. We quantified this effect by demonstrating that CNN-optimized excitatory surround images have strong similarity in neuronal response space with surround images generated by extrapolating the statistical properties of the center, and with patches of natural scenes, which are known to exhibit high spatial correlations. Our findings cannot be explained by theories like redundancy reduction or predictive coding previously linked to contextual modulation in visual cortex. Instead, we demonstrated that a hierarchical probabilistic model incorporating Bayesian inference, and modulating neuronal responses based on prior knowledge of natural scene statistics, can explain our empirical results. We replicated these center-surround effects in the multi-area functional connectomics MICrONS dataset using natural movies as visual stimuli, which opens the way towards understanding circuit level mechanism, such as the contributions of lateral and feedback recurrent connections. Our data-driven modeling approach provides a new understanding of the role of contextual interactions in sensory processing and can be adapted across brain areas, sensory modalities, and species.

Understanding the brain's perception algorithm is a highly intricate problem, as the inherent complexity of sensory inputs and the brain's nonlinear processing make characterizing sensory representations difficult. Recent studies have shown that functional models capable of predicting large-scale neuronal activity in response to arbitrary sensory input can be powerful tools for characterizing neuronal representations by enabling unlimited in silico experiments. However, accurately modeling responses to dynamic and ecologically relevant inputs like videos remains challenging, particularly when generalizing to new stimulus domains outside the training distribution. Inspired by recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, where foundation models-trained on vast quantities of data-have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and generalization, we developed a "foundation model" of the mouse visual cortex: a deep neural network trained on large amounts of neuronal responses to ecological videos from multiple visual cortical areas and mice. The model accurately predicted neuronal responses not only to natural videos but also to various new stimulus domains, such as coherent moving dots and noise patterns, as verified in vivo, underscoring its generalization abilities. The foundation model could also be adapted to new mice with minimal natural movie training data. We applied the foundation model to the MICrONS dataset: a study of the brain that integrates structure with function at unprecedented scale, containing nanometer-scale morphology, connectivity with >500,000,000 synapses, and function of >70,000 neurons within a ~1mm3 volume spanning multiple areas of the mouse visual cortex. This accurate functional model of the MICrONS data opens the possibility for a systematic characterization of the relationship between circuit structure and function. By precisely capturing the response properties of the visual cortex and generalizing to new stimulus domains and mice, foundation models can pave the way for a deeper understanding of visual computation.