Intracellular Whole-Cell Patch-Clamp Recordings of Cortical Neurons in Awake Head-Restrained Mice

Crochet, Sylvain

doi:10.1007/7657_2011_7

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Over 4 days of habituation, the duration of head‐fixation was gradually increased to 1 h. On the fifth day, the animal was anaesthetised with 3% of isoflurane circulation through the face mask and the Kwik‐Kast was removed. The skull was drilled circularly (Crochet, ) over the location of the C2 intrinsic signal, which was marked with a shallow drill hole during the first surgery. The centre of drilling (∼300 μm) was thinned to the level of the dura mater, avoiding the blood vessels.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diverse tuning underlies sparse activity in layer 2/3 vibrissal cortex of awake mice

Ranjbar-Slamloo

Arabzadeh

2019

The Journal of Physiology

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Key pointsr Sparse population activity is a common feature observed across cortical areas, yet the implications for sensory coding are not clear.r We recorded single neuron activity in the vibrissal somatosensory cortex of awake head-fixed mice using the cell-attached technique.r Unlike the anaesthetised condition, in awake mice a high-velocity, piezo-controlled whisker deflection excited only a small fraction of neurons.r Manual probing of whiskers revealed that the majority of these silent neurons could be activated by specific forms of whisker-object contact.r Our results suggest that sparse coding in vibrissal cortex may be due to high dimensionality of the stimulus space and narrow tuning of individual neurons.Abstract It is widely reported that superficial layers of the somatosensory cortex exhibit sparse firing. This sparseness could reflect weak feedforward sensory inputs that are not sufficient to generate action potentials in these layers. Alternatively, sparseness might reflect tuning to unknown or higher-level complex features that are not fully explored in the stimulus space. Here, we examined these hypotheses by applying a range of vibrotactile and manual vibrissal stimuli in awake, head-fixed mice while performing loose-seal cell-attached recordings from the vibrissal primary somatosensory (vS1) cortex. A high-velocity stimulus delivered by a piezo-electric actuator evoked activity in a small fraction of regular spiking supragranular neurons (23%) in the awake condition. However, a majority of the supragranular regular spiking neurons (84%) were driven by manual stimulation of whiskers. Our results suggest that most neurons in the superficial layers of vS1 cortex contribute to coding in the awake condition when neurons may encounter their preferred feature(s) during whisker-object interactions.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diverse tuning underlies sparse activity in layer 2/3 vibrissal cortex of awake mice

Ranjbar-Slamloo

Arabzadeh

2019

The Journal of Physiology

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“…Two silver wires were inserted on both sides of the cerebellum for reference and grounding. A light-weight metal head-post was also cemented to the skull allowing painless head-fixation during recording sessions (Crochet 2012). At the end of the recording sessions, the animals were deeply anesthetized with pentobarbital (60 mg/kg; intraperitoneally).…”

Section: Animal Preparationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Highly Dynamic Spatiotemporal Organization of Low-Frequency Activities During Behavioral States in the Mouse Cerebral Cortex

et al. 2016

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Although low-frequency (LF < 10 Hz) activities have been considered as a hallmark of nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, several studies have recently reported LF activities in the membrane potential of cortical neurons from different areas in awake mice. However, little is known about the spatiotemporal organization of LF activities across cortical areas during wakefulness and to what extent it differs during NREM sleep. We have thus investigated the dynamics of LF activities across cortical areas in awake and sleeping mice using chronic simultaneous local field potential recordings. We found that LF activities had higher amplitude in somatosensory and motor areas during quiet wakefulness and decreased in most areas during active wakefulness, resulting in a global state change that was overall correlated with motor activity. However, we also observed transient desynchronization of cortical states between areas, indicating a more local state regulation. During NREM sleep, LF activities had higher amplitude in all areas but slow-wave activity was only poorly correlated across cortical areas. Despite a maximal amplitude during NREM sleep, the coherence of LF activities between areas that are not directly connected dropped from wakefulness to NREM sleep, potentially reflecting a breakdown of long-range cortical integration associated with loss of consciousness.

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“…In the last decade, these intracellular recording techniques have been expanded to nonanesthetized animals during the natural sleep-wake cycle or quiet wakefulness using either sharp microelectrodes (Steriade et al, 2001;Mahon et al, 2006;Okun et al, 2010) or the whole-cell patch-clamp technique (Margrie et al, 2002;Petersen et al, 2003;Okun et al, 2010). Because whole-cell patch-clamp recordings are less sensitive to mechanical movements of brain tissue than sharp microelectrode recordings (see Crochet, 2012 for a detailed comparison of the two techniques), it has recently become a key approach to study membrane potential dynamics in awake behaving animals (Crochet and Petersen, 2006;Poulet and Petersen, 2008;Harvey et al, 2009;Haider et al, 2013). Combining patch-clamp recordings with twophoton microscopy furthermore allows targeted whole-cell recordings of specific neuronal populations in anesthetized (Margrie et al, 2003) and awake (Gentet et al, 2010(Gentet et al, , 2012 mice.…”

Section: Optical Imagingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synaptic Computation and Sensory Processing in Neocortical Layer 2/3

Petersen

Crochet

2013

Neuron

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206

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Computations in neocortical circuits are predominantly driven by synaptic integration of excitatory glutamatergic and inhibitory GABAergic inputs. New optical, electrophysiological, and genetic methods allow detailed in vivo investigation of the superficial neocortical layers 2 and 3 (L2/3). Here, we review current knowledge of mouse L2/3 sensory cortex, focusing on somatosensory barrel cortex with comparisons to visual and auditory cortex. Broadly tuned, dense subthreshold synaptic input accompanied by sparse action potential (AP) firing in excitatory neurons provides a simple and reliable neural code useful for associative learning. Sparse AP firing is enforced by strong inhibition from genetically defined classes of GABAergic neurons. Subnetworks of strongly and specifically connected excitatory neurons may drive L2/3 network function, with potential contributions from dendritic spikes evoked by spatiotemporally clustered synaptic input. These functional properties of L2/3 are under profound regulation by brain state and behavior, providing interesting avenues for future mechanistic investigations into context-specific processing of sensory information.

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Intracellular Whole-Cell Patch-Clamp Recordings of Cortical Neurons in Awake Head-Restrained Mice

Cited by 8 publications

References 40 publications

Diverse tuning underlies sparse activity in layer 2/3 vibrissal cortex of awake mice

Diverse tuning underlies sparse activity in layer 2/3 vibrissal cortex of awake mice

Highly Dynamic Spatiotemporal Organization of Low-Frequency Activities During Behavioral States in the Mouse Cerebral Cortex

Synaptic Computation and Sensory Processing in Neocortical Layer 2/3

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