Topic: excitatory-inhibitory balance

Excitatory and inhibitory inputs to cortical neurons remain balanced across different conditions. The balanced network model (Van Vreeswijk & Sompolinsky 1998) provides a self-consistent account of this observation: under mild inequality conditions on connectivity parameters, population rates dynamically adjust to yield a state in which inputs to all neurons are tightly balanced, keeping all populations active at biological levels. Global tight balance, however, predicts a linear stimulus-dependence for population responses and cannot explain systematic cortical response nonlinearities

Cognitive impairment and disturbed excitatory-inhibitory balance in the brain have been linked to severe psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, affective disorders, and autism spectrum disorders. Erythropoietin (EPO) may have a role in mitigating them by rectifying hippocampal transcriptional networks and synaptic architectures of pyramidal lineages when administered to juvenile mice. How EPO involves interneurons to rebuild synapses is an impending puzzle. After examining ~12,000 single-nuclei transcriptomic data, we generated a comprehensive molecular atlas of hippocampal interneurons,

GABAergic neurotransmission generates two types of inhibitions: the transient activation of synaptic GABA receptors, or phasic inhibition, which elicits inhibitory postsynaptic currents, and the activation of extrasynaptic GABA receptors by “ambient” GABA which causes a persistent, “tonic”, inhibition that finely tunes cellular excitability of target neurons. Change in GABA synaptic efficacy is a crucial mechanism that underlies experience-dependent modifications of brain function. Several forms of GABA synaptic plasticity require retrograde signaling by endocannabinoids (eCB) through the acti