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Short-Term Visual Experience Leads to Potentiation of Spontaneous Activity in Mouse Superior Colliculus

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Abstract

Spontaneous activity in the brain maintains an internal structured pattern that reflects the external environment, which is essential for processing information and developing perception and cognition. An essential prerequisite of spontaneous activity for perception is the ability to reverberate external information, such as by potentiation. Yet its role in the processing of potentiation in mouse superior colliculus (SC) neurons is less studied. Here, we used electrophysiological recording, optogenetics, and drug infusion methods to investigate the mechanism of potentiation in SC neurons. We found that visual experience potentiated SC neurons several minutes later in different developmental stages, and the similarity between spontaneous and visually-evoked activity increased with age. Before eye-opening, activation of retinal ganglion cells that expressed ChR2 also induced the potentiation of spontaneous activity in the mouse SC. Potentiation was dependent on stimulus number and showed feature selectivity for direction and orientation. Optogenetic activation of parvalbumin neurons in the SC attenuated the potentiation induced by visual experience. Furthermore, potentiation in SC neurons was blocked by inhibiting the glutamate transporter GLT1. These results indicated that the potentiation induced by a visual stimulus might play a key role in shaping the internal representation of the environment, and serves as a carrier for short-term memory consolidation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31771195, 81790640 and 82021002), a Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2018SHZDZX01) and ZJLab, Key Scientific Technological Innovation Research Project of the Ministry of Education, Sanming Project of Medicine in Shenzhen (SZSM202011015) and Shanghai Health and Family Planning Commission (20164Y0096, 20184Y0184).

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  1. Qingpeng Yu, Hang Fu and Gang Wang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institutes of Brain Science, State Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology and Ministry of Education Frontiers Center for Brain Science, Department of Ophthalmology, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Qingpeng Yu, Hang Fu, Jiayi Zhang & Biao Yan

  2. Center of Brain Sciences, Beijing Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, No. 27, Taiping Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100850, China

    Gang Wang

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  1. Qingpeng Yu
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Yu, Q., Fu, H., Wang, G. et al. Short-Term Visual Experience Leads to Potentiation of Spontaneous Activity in Mouse Superior Colliculus. Neurosci. Bull. 37, 353–368 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-020-00622-3

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