Contribution of amacrine transmission to fast adaptation of retinal ganglion cells

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Contribution of amacrine transmission to fast adaptation of retinal ganglion cells Neda Nategh1*, Mihai Manu1 and Stephen Baccus1 1 Stanford University, United States Retinal ganglion cells are most sensitive to the visual feature defined by the linear spatio-temporal receptive field. They encode this feature according to a nonlinear sensitivity curve that often has a threshold and saturation. Both the linear receptive field and nonlinearity are adaptive, in that these parameters change depending on the recent statistics of the stimulus. One potentially rich source to generate adaptation is the diverse population of inhibitory amacrine cells, which comprise about thirty types. Amacrine transmission is thought to play a role in retinal adaptation to more complex stimulus statistics (Hosoya et al., 2005), but not for simple statistics such as luminance and contrast. We measured how the signals transmitted through individual amacrine cells contribute to the ganglion cell response by recording intracellularly from single amacrine cells while simultaneously recording spiking activity from the ganglion cell population using a multielectrode array. We presented a randomly flickering visual stimulus drawn from a Gaussian distribution while injecting Gaussian white-noise current into the amacrine cell. By this direct perturbation of the circuit we measured how the interneuron generates adaptation of the ganglion cell visual response. To model the contribution of each amacrine cell to each ganglion cell’s visual response, we combined elements of a linear-nonlinear (LN) model, consisting of a linear temporal or spatio-temporal filter followed by a static nonlinearity. The model consisted of the linear receptive field and nonlinearity of the ganglion cell, a modulatory pathway containing the LN model of the amacrine cell, and a transmission filter linking the two pathways. We found that amacrine transmission scales the ganglion cell nonlinear response function by a gain factor. In some cases, we also found that amacrine output modulates the linear receptive field of the ganglion cell, changing it from being more integrating to more differentiating. This modulation is driven by the preferred feature of the amacrine cell, even if this feature is different from that of the ganglion cell. Even at a fixed luminance and contrast, retinal ganglion cells adapt at a fast timescale. For this type of adaptation, an amacrine cell provides contextual information that modulates the ganglion cell visual response. Thus, the space of visual features encoded by the diverse population of amacrine cells defines a multidimensional context that gates and modifies a different space of visual feature encoded by the population of ganglion cells. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session I Citation: Nategh N, Manu M and Baccus S (2010). Contribution of amacrine transmission to fast adaptation of retinal ganglion cells. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00146 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 02 Mar 2010; Published Online: 02 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Neda Nategh, Stanford University, Stanford, United States, nnategh@stanford.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Neda Nategh Mihai Manu Stephen Baccus Google Neda Nategh Mihai Manu Stephen Baccus Google Scholar Neda Nategh Mihai Manu Stephen Baccus PubMed Neda Nategh Mihai Manu Stephen Baccus Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.