Journal ArticleDOI
Wiring specificity in the direction-selectivity circuit of the retina
TLDR
It is shown, using serial block-face electron microscopy and two-photon calcium imaging, that the dendrites of mouse starburst amacrine cells make highly specific synapses with direction-selective ganglion cells depending on the ganglION cell’s preferred direction.Abstract:
The proper connectivity between neurons is essential for the implementation of the algorithms used in neural computations, such as the detection of directed motion by the retina. The analysis of neuronal connectivity is possible with electron microscopy, but technological limitations have impeded the acquisition of high-resolution data on a large enough scale. Here we show, using serial block-face electron microscopy and two-photon calcium imaging, that the dendrites of mouse starburst amacrine cells make highly specific synapses with direction-selective ganglion cells depending on the ganglion cell's preferred direction. Our findings indicate that a structural (wiring) asymmetry contributes to the computation of direction selectivity. The nature of this asymmetry supports some models of direction selectivity and rules out others. It also puts constraints on the developmental mechanisms behind the formation of synaptic connections. Our study demonstrates how otherwise intractable neurobiological questions can be addressed by combining functional imaging with the analysis of neuronal connectivity using large-scale electron microscopy.read more
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Book ChapterDOI
Synapse formation in the developing vertebrate retina
TL;DR: This chapter summarizes the current understanding of synaptogenesis, formation of synaptic laminae, and emergence of synaptic specificity with a focus on the mouse retina, where state-of-the-art techniques are combined to explore the assembly of functionally defined circuits in unprecedented detail.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reconstruction of recurrent synaptic connectivity of thousands of neurons from simulated spiking activity
TL;DR: In this paper, the maximum likelihood estimation of a generalized linear model of the spiking activity in continuous time is employed for the reconstruction of large recurrent neuronal networks from thousands of parallel spike train recordings.
Journal ArticleDOI
Determination of secretory granule maturation times in pancreatic islet β-cells by serial block-face electron microscopy.
Amith Rao,E.L. McBride,Guofeng Zhang,Huanyu Xu,Tao Cai,A. L. Notkins,Maria A. Aronova,Richard D. Leapman +7 more
TL;DR: It is shown how serial block-face electron microscopy of insulin-secreting β-cells in wild-type mouse pancreatic islets of Langerhans can be used to determine maturation times of secretory granules.
BookDOI
Neural Tracing Methods
TL;DR: This chapter provides a systematic description of neuroanatomical tracing methods, starting with the “mother of retrograde tracing methods”: the technique of injection, uptake, and transport of the enzyme horseradish peroxidase and continues with fl uorescent dye tracing.
Journal ArticleDOI
Biological convolutions improve DNN robustness to noise and generalisation
TL;DR: In this article , fixed biological filter banks, in particular banks of Gabor filters, are used to constrain the networks to avoid reliance on shortcuts, making them develop more structured internal representations and more tolerance to noise.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
The mechanism of directionally selective units in rabbit's retina.
Horace Barlow,W. R. Levick +1 more
TL;DR: Experiments are described which show, first, that directional selectivity is not due to optical aberrations of some kind and, secondly, that it is not a simple matter of the latency of response varying systematically across the receptive field.
Journal ArticleDOI
Serial block−face scanning electron microscopy to reconstruct three−dimensional tissue nanostructure
Winfried Denk,Heinz Horstmann +1 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that datasets meeting these requirements can be obtained by automated block-face imaging combined with serial sectioning inside the chamber of a scanning electron microscope, opening the possibility of automatically obtaining the electron-microscope-level 3D datasets needed to completely reconstruct the connectivity of neuronal circuits.
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