Last update: 11/26/2013
The projective field of retinal bipolar cells and its modulation by visual context
Asari, H. and Meister, M.
Abstract
The receptive field of a sensory neuron spells out all the receptor inputs it receives. To understand a neuron’s role in the circuit, one also needs to know its projective field, namely the outputs it sends to all downstream cells. Here we present the projective fields of the primary excitatory neurons in a sensory circuit. We stimulated single bipolar cells of the salamander retina and recorded simultaneously from a population of ganglion cells. Individual bipolar cell signals diverge through polysynaptic pathways into ganglion cells of many different types and over surprisingly large distance. However, the strength and polarity of the projection depend on the cell types involved. Furthermore, visual stimulation strongly modulates the bipolar cell projective field, in opposite direction for different cell types. In this way the context from distant parts of the visual field can control the routing of signals in the inner retina.
Highlights
- Signals from a bipolar cell spread far into the ganglion cell layer.
- Each functional type of bipolar cell projects to many types of ganglion cells.
- Fast OFF bipolar cells have the strongest projections in the salamander retina.
- Visual stimulation causes marked changes in the bipolar cell projective field.
Poster: Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) 2009, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Poster: Sloan-Swartz Annual Meeting on Computational Neuroscience, 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Poster: Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE), 2010, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Reprint (PDF: 2.3 MB). Neuron. 81: 641-652.