Topic: early postnatal development

Early postnatal development is a critical period for the establishment of functional brain networks. While extensive research has focused on local circuit maturation, the emergence and evolution of long-range communication between brain regions has received less attention. Here we investigate the developmental trajectory of inter-regional communication in the mouse brain over the first two postnatal weeks of life, a period characterised by rapid synaptogenesis followed by activity-dependent pruning and circuit refinement. We leverage electrophysiological datasets of population activity simulta

Brain circuits in mouse pups develop and mature extensively during the first few weeks of life. During early postnatal development, sensory cortices experience patterned spontaneous activity which is known to refine neural connectivity, preparing the animal to engage in sensorimotor tasks immediately upon ear and eye opening (∼P4 and ∼P15, respectively). In primary visual cortex (V1), spontaneous activity originates from two sources, from the retina relayed by thalamus and intrinsically generated in the cortex. Spontaneous events from these two sources have different spatiotemporal properties: