RT Journal Article
T1 Corticofugal modulation of the tactile response coherence of projecting neurons in the gracilis nucleus
A1 Makarov Slizneva, Valeriy
A1 Castellanos, Nazareth P.
A1 Malmierca, Eduardo
A1 Nuñez, Ángel
AB Precise and reproducible spike timing is one of the alternatives of the sensory stimulus encoding. We test coherence (repeatability) of the response patterns elicited in projecting gracile neurons by tactile stimulation and its modulation provoked by electrical stimulation of the corticofugal feedback from the somatosensory (SI) cortex. To gain the temporal structure we adopt the wavelet-based approach for quantification of the functional stimulus-neural response coupling. We show that the spontaneous firing patterns (when they exist) are essentially random. Tactile stimulation of the neuron receptive field strongly increases the spectral power in the stimulus and 5- to 15-Hz frequency bands. However, the functional coupling (coherence) between the sensory stimulus and the neural response exhibits ultraslow oscillation (0.07 Hz). During this oscillation the stimulus coherence can temporarily fall below the statistically significant level, i.e., the functional stimulus-response coupling may be temporarily lost for a single neuron. We further demonstrate that electrical stimulation of the SI cortex increases the stimulus coherence for about 60% of cells. We find no significant correlation between the increment of the firing rate and the stimulus coherence, but we show that there is a positive correlation with the amplitude of the peristimulus time histogram. The latter argues that the observed facilitation of the neural response by the corticofugal pathway, at least in part, may be mediated through an appropriate ordering of the stimulus-evoked firing pattern, and the coherence enhancement is more relevant in gracilis nucleus than an increase of the number of spikes elicited by the tactile stimulus.
PB American Physiological Society
SN 0022-3077
YR 2007
FD 2007
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/50133
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/50133
LA eng
NO Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia
NO Ramón y Cajal
NO Santander-Complutense
DS Docta Complutense
RD 23 abr 2025