The mechanisms underlying sound-evoked suppression of neuronal firing in the auditory system are poorly understood. To explore these mechanisms in the inferior colliculus (IC), agonists and antagonists targeting different groups of metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) were applied iontophoretically to IC neurons in awake mice. We found that a group I-specific mGluR agonist predominantly increased neuronal firing in 52% of neurons, whereas group I antagonist had the opposite effect in 51% of neurons. A group II specific agonist showed no effect on neuronal firing but an antagonist increased firing rate in 48% of neurons. Neither a group III-specific mGluR agonist nor an antagonist had an effect on neuronal firing in the IC. We also found that sound stimuli triggered suppression of spontaneous firing in 70% of IC neurons. This suppression was reversibly blocked by group I mGluR antagonists. There is a possible link between this suppression and two perceptual phenomena: forward masking and "residual inhibition," the brief reduction/elimination of tinnitus following an appropriate masking sound.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2011.01.075 | DOI Listing |
Behav Brain Res
January 2025
Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Colima, Colima, Mexico 28040. Electronic address:
Tactile information from the whiskers (vibrissae) travels through the somatosensory cortex to the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus, influencing development and psychological well-being. The lack of whiskers affects cognitive functions, spatial memory, neuronal firing, spatial mapping, and neurogenesis in the dorsal hippocampus. Recent studies underline the importance of tactile experiences in emotional health, noting that while tactile stimuli modulate the dorsal hippocampus, the effects of tactile deprivation on anxiety-like behaviors and neural activity in regions like the ventral hippocampus and amygdala are less understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Biol Chem
January 2025
Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA; Molecular, Cellular & Integrated Neurosciences, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA; Cell & Molecular Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA. Electronic address:
The Shab family voltage-gated K channels (i.e., Kv2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElife
January 2025
Department of Anesthesia, Women's Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, China.
The inferior colliculus (IC) has traditionally been regarded as an important relay in the auditory pathway, primarily involved in relaying auditory information from the brainstem to the thalamus. However, this study uncovers the multifaceted role of the IC in bridging auditory processing, sensory prediction, and reward prediction. Through extracellular recordings in monkeys engaged in a sound duration-based deviation detection task, we observed a 'climbing effect' in neuronal firing rates, indicative of an enhanced response over sound sequences linked to sensory prediction rather than reward anticipation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev Lett
December 2024
University of Strathclyde, Institute of Photonics, SUPA Dept of Physics, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
We report a spiking flip-flop memory mechanism that allows controllably switching between neural-like excitable spike-firing and quiescent dynamics in a resonant tunneling diode (RTD) neuron under low-amplitude (<150 mV pulses) and high-speed (ns rate) inputs pulses. We also show that the timing of the set-reset input pulses is critical to elicit switching responses between spiking and quiescent regimes in the system. The demonstrated flip-flop spiking memory, in which spiking regimes can be controllably excited, stored, and inhibited in RTD neurons via specific low-amplitude, high-speed signals (delivered at proper time instants) offers high promise for RTD-based spiking neural networks, with the potential to be extended further to optoelectronic implementations where RTD neurons and RTD memory elements are deployed alongside for fast and efficient photonic-electronic neuromorphic computing and artificial intelligence hardware.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrends Genet
January 2025
Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan; Institute of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518132, China. Electronic address:
Neuronal activity, including sensory-evoked and spontaneous firing, regulates the expression of a subset of genes known as activity-dependent genes. A key issue in this process is the activation and accumulation of transcription factors (TFs), which bind to cis-elements at specific enhancers and promoters, ultimately driving RNA synthesis through transcription machinery. Epigenetic factors such as histone modifiers also play a crucial role in facilitating the specific binding of TFs.
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