NSF NRT UtB: Neurophotonics Spring Seminar – Thursday, February 1, 2018
Please join us at 11:30 AM for lunch at
- Boston University Photonics Center
- 8 Saint Mary’s Street
- Room 906, Boston, MA 02215
Mark Andermann from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center & Harvard University will lead a discussion on “A fine-scale functional logic to convergence from retina to thalamus“. This lunch seminar will start at 11:30 AM. Registration is required to ensure a lunch will be ordered for you.
Abstract: Numerous well-defined classes of retinal ganglion cells innervate the thalamus to guide image-forming vision, yet the rules governing their convergence and divergence remain unknown. Using two-photon calcium imaging in awake mouse thalamus, we observed a functional arrangement of retinal ganglion cell axonal boutons in which coarse-scale retinotopic ordering gives way to fine-scale organization based on shared preferences for visual features such as axis or direction of motion, spatial frequency, and/or changes in luminance. Specifically, at the ~6 micron scale, clusters of boutons from different axons often showed similar preferences for either one or multiple features. Conversely, individual axons could “de-multiplex” information channels by participating in multiple, functionally-distinct bouton clusters. Finally, ultrastructural analyses demonstrated that axonal boutons in a local cluster often target the same postsynaptic dendritic domain. These data suggest that functionally-specific convergence and divergence of retinal axons may impart diverse, robust and often novel feature selectivity to visual thalamus.