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1 Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Calgary, Canada
2 Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Center for Neural Dynamics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rwturner{at}ucalgary.ca.
The tuning of neuronal responsiveness to specific stimulus frequencies is an important computation across many sensory modalities. The weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus detects amplitude modulations of a self-generated quasi-sinusoidal electric organ discharge in order to sense its environment. These fish have to parse a complicated electrosensory environment with a wide range of possible frequency content. One solution has been to create multiple representations of the sensory input across distinct maps in the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) that have a preferred range of stimulus frequencies and that participate in distinct behavioural functions. We examined how variations in the intrinsic spiking mechanism of E- and I-type ELL pyramidal cells could contribute to map-specific frequency tuning. We find that E-cells exhibit a systematic change in their intrinsic spike characteristics and frequency tuning across sensory maps, while I-cells are constant in both spike characteristics and frequency tuning. As frequency tuning becomes more high-pass in E-cells, the refractory variables of spike width and afterhyperpolarization (AHP) magnitude increase, spike threshold increases, adaptation becomes faster and the gain of the spiking response decreases. These findings indicate that frequency tuning across sensory maps in the CNS is supported by differences in the intrinsic spike characteristics of projection neurons, revealing a link between cellular biophysical properties and signal processing in sensory maps with defined behavioural roles.
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