Journal ArticleDOI
Wiring specificity in the direction-selectivity circuit of the retina
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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
Contributions of Rod and Cone Pathways to Retinal Direction Selectivity Through Development.
TL;DR: Although direction selectivity is robust across light intensities, motion discrimination for OFF signals is dependent upon ON signaling, and results provide evidence that the retina uses multiple strategies for computing DS responses across different stimulus conditions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Antagonistic Center-Surround Mechanisms for Direction Selectivity in the Retina
Lea Ankri,Elishai Ezra-Tsur,Elishai Ezra-Tsur,Shir R. Maimon,Nathali Kaushansky,Michal Rivlin-Etzion +5 more
TL;DR: These findings reveal antagonistic center-surround mechanisms for direction selectivity and demonstrate how context-dependent receptive field reorganization enables flexible computations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Directional excitatory input to direction‐selective ganglion cells in the rabbit retina
TL;DR: The strength of the directional excitatory signal varies considerably across the sample of cells, but is not correlated with the strength of directional inhibition, as required for a voltage‐clamp artifact.
Journal ArticleDOI
Direction Selectivity Mediated by Adaptation in the Owl's Inferior Colliculus
Yunyan Wang,Jose L. Pena +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown that the preferred direction and the degree of direction selectivity can be predicted by response adaptation to sounds moving over asymmetric spatial receptive fields and a model of suppression based on spatiotemporal summation predicted the observations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Amacrine cell-mediated input to bipolar cells: variations on a common mechanistic theme.
TL;DR: Current understandings of amacrine cell-mediated feedback and output to bipolar cells on the synaptic, cellular, and circuit levels are discussed, while drawing connections to visual processing.
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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