Highlights Striking Images

Figure: One single neuron is living in a network where other neurons are sending their connections via the synapses to this neuron. In the retina, one ganglion cell receives excitatory inputs from the bipolar cells. We developed a novel approach, termed spike-triggered non-negative matrix factorization (STNMF), to identify these excitatory subunits for a given ganglion cell. The figure illustrates how these bipolar cells (one blues disk is representing one receptive field of the identified bipolar cell.) are located in the dendritic tree of a ganglion cell (red neuromorphic tree). Designed by H.M. Schreyer and M.H. Khani.

Reference: Liu, J. K., Schreyer, H.M., Onken, A., Rozenblit, F., Khani, M.H., Krishnamoorthy, V., Panzeri, S., and Gollisch, T. Inference of neuronal functional circuitry with spike-triggered non-negative matrix factorization, Nature Communications, 8:149 (2017). [PDF]

Figure: The visual system has to cope with wide ranges of light conditions, for example, provided by variations in visual contrast. Neurons in the retina adapt to changing contrast by altering how they filter visual stimuli over time. We found that this adaptation can be well described for individual cells by alterations in the relative sensitivity to two fixed visual features. The figure illustrates how signal processing changes from being dominated by feature 1 at low contrast (lower right) towards larger contributions by feature 2 at higher contrast (upper left). Designed by Jian K Liu.

Reference: Liu, J.K., Gollisch, T., Spike-Triggered Covariance Analysis Reveals Phenomenological Diversity of Contrast Adaptation in the Retina, PLoS Comput Biol 11(7): e1004425. (2015) [PDF]