Topic: whole-cell recordings

Animals faced with predatorial threats innately react by escaping to safety. Although escape is instinctive, it is also flexible enough to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment. For example, animals adapt to the risk of predation by increasing escape probability when there is a higher incidence of predator attacks. This flexibility is critical for maximizing the adaptiveness of behavioural choices, but the underlying mechanisms are unknown. It has recently been shown that activation of neurons in the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG) is the main step for commanding escape initiation. Her

Animals faced with predatorial threats innately react by escaping to safety. Although escape is instinctive, it is also flexible enough to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment. For example, animals adapt to the risk of predation by increasing escape probability when there is a higher incidence of predator attacks. This flexibility is critical for maximizing the adaptiveness of behavioural choices, but the underlying mechanisms are unknown. Previous work has shown that activation of neurons in the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG) is the main step for commanding escape initiation. Here w

Achieving early diagnosis in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a crucial objective in preclinical and clinical AD research, since it represents a therapeutic window during which interventions can be initiated before the onset of severe cognitive decline. Accumulation of amyloid-beta (Aß) in the prefrontal cortex is linked to rapid forgetting in this prodromal AD stage. Thus, early forgetting becomes a potential target for preclinical studies seeking to prevent/delay the onset of severe forms of AD. We used mouse models to identify early alterations in memory formation. Our findings indicate that Aβ1

The electrical behavior of neurons depends on their morphology as well as various biophysical characteristics including passive membrane and intracellular properties and the identities and densities of voltage-gated ion channels. However, some of these parameters are often not sufficiently constrained by the available experimental data and need to be inferred from the response of the neuron to specific external stimuli. Data-driven models have proved to be useful in this context; one approach is to tune the unknown parameters in the model until the output of the model best approximates the tar

Male predominance is one of the least understood characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). While more than a hundred genes are involved in ASD, only a few of them show sex differences in behavior. In a previous work, we found that male mice harboring a mutation in the Pogz gene (Pogz+/-) show sexually dimorphic overly friendly behavior in several sociability assays. Mapping the engaged neurons during social recognition revealed that in Pogz+/- males, there are more activated neurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) than control and Pogz+/- female mice. To characterize the morphophysi

Chandelier cells (ChCs) that are present only in cortical structures selectively form synapses on the axon initial segments (AISs) of principal neurons (PNs) – the site of action potential generation. Therefore, these GABAergic cells are in the position to control the spiking of their postsynaptic partners in the most powerful way. Here, we compared anatomical and electrophysiological features of ChCs sampled in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of the Nkx2.1-Cre and PVeGFP mouse lines.By performing whole-cell recordings from ChCs in acute prefrontal cortical slices, we found that ChCs label

The primary olfactory cortex (piriform cortex) is a well-established epileptogenic site with the potential to amplify and generalize seizures. Disinhibition, caused by the synaptic inhibition of inhibitory neurons by other inhibitory neurons, increases the excitability of principal neurons and has been proposed as a contributing factor in numerous neurological diseases, including epilepsy. Therefore, unravelling inhibitory microcircuits in the piriform cortex may uncover new therapeutic avenues for treating epilepsy. Our study used whole-cell recordings from identified classes of inhibitory in