Experience-dependent connectivity of inhibitory neurons in the olfactory cortex
Samuel Muscinelli, Andrew Fink, Shuqi Wang, Marcus Hogan, Courtney Kim, Daniel English, Richard Axel, Ashok Litwin-Kumar, Carl Schoonover · COSYNE 2025
Organisms continually tune their perceptual systems to the features they encounter in their environment. We have studied how this experience reorganizes the synaptic connectivity of neurons in the olfactory (piriform) cortex of the mouse. We developed an approach to measure synaptic connectivity in vivo, training a deep convolutional network to reliably identify monosynaptic connections from the spike-time cross-correlograms of 4.4 million single-unit pairs. This revealed that excitatory piriform neurons that respond similarly to each other are more likely to be connected. We asked whether thi