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Somatostatin-Expressing Interneurons in the Auditory Cortex Mediate Sustained Suppression by Spectral Surround.

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Nardoci, Matthew B 
Jaramillo, Santiago  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6595-8450

Abstract

Sensory systems integrate multiple stimulus features to generate coherent percepts. Spectral surround suppression, the phenomenon by which sound-evoked responses of auditory neurons are suppressed by stimuli outside their receptive field, is an example of this integration taking place in the auditory system. While this form of global integration is commonly observed in auditory cortical neurons, and potentially used by the nervous system to separate signals from noise, the mechanisms that underlie this suppression of activity are not well understood. We evaluated the contributions to spectral surround suppression of the two most common inhibitory cell types in the cortex, parvalbumin-expressing (PV+) and somatostatin-expressing (SOM+) interneurons, in mice of both sexes. We found that inactivating SOM+ cells, but not PV+ cells, significantly reduces sustained spectral surround suppression in excitatory cells, indicating a dominant causal role for SOM+ cells in the integration of information across multiple frequencies. The similarity of these results to those from other sensory cortices provides evidence of common mechanisms across the cerebral cortex for generating global percepts from separate features.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT To generate coherent percepts, sensory systems integrate simultaneously occurring features of a stimulus, yet the mechanisms by which this integration occurs are not fully understood. Our results show that neurochemically distinct neuronal subtypes in the primary auditory cortex have different contributions to the integration of different frequency components of an acoustic stimulus. Together with findings from other sensory cortices, our results provide evidence of a common mechanism for cortical computations used for global integration of stimulus features.

Description

Keywords

auditory cortex, cortical inhibition, sensory processing, Acoustic Stimulation, Action Potentials, Animals, Auditory Cortex, Electrodes, Implanted, Female, Gene Expression, Interneurons, Male, Mice, Mice, Transgenic, Somatostatin

Journal Title

J Neurosci

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0270-6474
1529-2401

Volume Title

40

Publisher

Society for Neuroscience

Rights

All rights reserved