Topic: non-Hebbian plasticity

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

Timely reaction to salient stimuli is essential for survival. The subcortical thalamic-basolateral amygdala (BLA) pathway ensures rapid processing. Here, we show that BLA neuronal, and thalamic axonal activity mirror the defensive behaviour evoked by an innate-visual-threat as well as an auditory-learned-threat. Perturbing this pathway compromises defensive responses to both threats. Our side-by-side examination highlights innate and learned threat processing in the subcortical amygdala pathway, thus providing new fundamental insights. Next, we examined the role of homo- and hetero-synaptic pl