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
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Inhibitory Gating of Input Comparison in the CA1 Microcircuit.
Aaron D. Milstein,Erik B. Bloss,Pierre F. Apostolides,Sachin P Vaidya,Geoffrey A. Dilly,Boris V. Zemelman,Jeffrey C. Magee +6 more
TL;DR: It is found that a particular subpopulation of CA1 interneurons expressing neuropeptide Y (NPY) contributes prominently to this dynamic filter by integrating both ECIII and CA3 input pathways and potently inhibiting CA1 pyramidal neuron dendrites.
Posted ContentDOI
Reconstruction of motor control circuits in adult Drosophila using automated transmission electron microscopy
Jasper T. Maniates-Selvin,David G. C. Hildebrand,Brett J. Graham,Aaron T. Kuan,Logan A. Thomas,Tri Nguyen,Julia Buhmann,Anthony W. Azevedo,Brendan L. Shanney,Jan Funke,John C. Tuthill,Wei-Chung Allen Lee +11 more
TL;DR: This work presents a synapse-resolution EM dataset containing the ventral nerve cord of an adult female Drosophila melanogaster, and shows that a specific class of leg sensory neurons directly synapse onto the largest-caliber motor neuron axons on both sides of the body, representing a unique feedback pathway for fast limb control.
Posted ContentDOI
Dense connectomic reconstruction in layer 4 of the somatosensory cortex
Alessandro Motta,Manuel Berning,Kevin M Boergens,Benedikt Staffler,Marcel Beining,Sahil Loomba,Christian Schramm,Philipp Hennig,Heiko Wissler,Moritz Helmstaedter +9 more
TL;DR: The dense reconstruction of a volume of about 500,000 μm3 from layer 4 of mouse barrel cortex is reported, about 300 times larger than previous dense reconstructions from the mammalian cerebral cortex, and an approach to connectomic phenotyping of local dense neuronal circuitry in the mammalian cortex is established.
Journal ArticleDOI
The role of starburst amacrine cells in visual signal processing.
W.R. Taylor,Robert G. Smith +1 more
TL;DR: The results of the model simulations suggest that reciprocal inhibitory connections between closely spaced SBACs should be spatially selective, while connections between more widely spaced cells could be indiscriminate.
Journal ArticleDOI
Correlative light and electron microscopy using cathodoluminescence from nanoparticles with distinguishable colours
David Glenn,Huidan Zhang,Narayanan Kasthuri,Richard Schalek,Pik Kwan Lo,Alexei Trifonov,Hongkun Park,Jeff W. Lichtman,Ronald L. Walsworth +8 more
TL;DR: The results pave the way for the use of such nanoparticles for targeted labeling of surfaces to provide nanoscale mapping of molecular composition, indicated by cathodoluminescence colour, simultaneously acquired with structural electron images in a single instrument.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Two-Photon Laser Scanning Fluorescence Microscopy
TL;DR: The fluorescence emission increased quadratically with the excitation intensity so that fluorescence and photo-bleaching were confined to the vicinity of the focal plane as expected for cooperative two-photon excitation.
Journal ArticleDOI
User-guided 3D active contour segmentation of anatomical structures: Significantly improved efficiency and reliability
Paul A. Yushkevich,Joseph Piven,Heather C. Hazlett,Rachel Gimpel Smith,Sean Ho,James C. Gee,Guido Gerig +6 more
TL;DR: The methods and software engineering philosophy behind this new tool, ITK-SNAP, are described and the results of validation experiments performed in the context of an ongoing child autism neuroimaging study are provided, finding that SNAP is a highly reliable and efficient alternative to manual tracing.
Journal ArticleDOI
The structure of the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans
TL;DR: The structure and connectivity of the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been deduced from reconstructions of electron micrographs of serial sections as discussed by the authors.
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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