No abstract

The mammalian visual system, from retina to neocortex, has been extensively studied at both anatomical and functional levels. Anatomy indicates the cortico-thalamic system is hierarchical, but characterization of cellular-level functional interactions across multiple levels of this hierarchy is lacking, partially due to the challenge of simultaneously recording activity across numerous regions. Here, we describe a large, open dataset (part of the Allen Brain Observatory) that surveys spiking from units in six cortical and two thalamic regions responding to a battery of visual stimuli. Using spike cross-correlation analysis, we find that inter-area functional connectivity mirrors the anatomical hierarchy from the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas. Classical functional measures of hierarchy, including visual response latency, receptive field size, phase-locking to a drifting grating stimulus, and autocorrelation timescale are all correlated with the anatomical hierarchy. Moreover, recordings during a visual task support the behavioral relevance of hierarchical processing. Overall, this dataset and the hierarchy we describe provide a foundation for understanding coding and dynamics in the mouse cortico-thalamic visual system..

Within the olfactory system, information flow from the periphery onto output mitral cells (MCs) of the olfactory bulb (OB) has been thought to be mediated by direct synaptic inputs from olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). Here, we performed patch-clamp measurements in rat and mouse OB slices to investigate mechanisms of OSN signaling onto MCs, including the assumption of a direct path, using electrical and optogenetic stimulation methods that selectively activated OSNs. We found that MCs are in fact not typically activated by direct OSN inputs and instead require a multistep, diffuse mechanism involving another glutamatergic cell-type, the tufted cells. The preference for a multi-step mechanism reflects the fact that signals arising from direct OSN inputs are drastically shunted by connexin 36-mediated gap junctions on MCs, but not tufted cells. An OB circuit with tufted cells intermediate between OSNs and MCs suggests that considerable processing of olfactory information occurs prior to it reaching MCs.