Complementary networks of cortical somatostatin interneurons enforce layer specific control

• DOI: 10.7554/elife.43696
• Publication Date: 2019-03-18T13:01:00Z
• Authors: Alexander Naka; Julia Veit; Ben Shababo; Rebecca K Chance; Davide Risso; David Stafford; Benjamin Snyder; Andrew Egladyous; Desiree Chu; Savitha Sridharan; Daniel P Mossing; Liam Paninski; John Ngai; Hillel Adesnik
• Keywords: Neocortex; Barrel cortex; Nerve net; Biological neural network; Pyramidal cell

The neocortex is functionally organized into layers. Layer four receives the densest bottom up sensory inputs, while layers 2/3 and 5 receive top down inputs that may convey predictive information. A subset of cortical somatostatin (SST) neurons, Martinotti cells, gate input by inhibiting apical dendrites pyramidal cells in 5, but it unknown whether an analogous inhibitory mechanism controls activity layer 4. Using high precision circuit mapping, vivo optogenetic perturbations, single cell transcriptional profiling, we reveal complementary circuits mouse barrel cortex involving genetically distinct SST subtypes specifically reciprocally interconnect with excitatory different layers: connect whereas non-Martinotti By enforcing layer-specific inhibition, these parallel subnetworks could independently regulate balance between input.