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Astrocytes

More than meets the eye

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 9, page 586 (2008)Cite this article

The authors loaded V1 cells of anaesthetized ferrets with a fluorescent Ca2+ indicator and measured cellular activity using two-photon Ca2+ imaging. Surprisingly, not only neurons but also astrocytes responded to visual stimuli consisting of drifting black and white bars, although the astrocytes responded 2–4 seconds later than the neurons.

V1 neurons respond to a stimulus only if it appears in a restricted part of space (the neuron's receptive field), and they respond most strongly to stimuli that have a particular orientation and spatial frequency (the sparseness of the bars). Astrocytes seemed to resemble V1 neurons in this respect: each astrocyte had a spatially restricted receptive field that overlapped with that of a neighbouring V1 neuron. Furthermore, each displayed an orientation- and spatial-frequency tuning that was strikingly similar to, and in fact sharper than, that of the nearby V1 neuron.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Schummers, J., Yu, H. & Sur, M. Tuned responses of astrocytes and their influence on hemodynamic signals in the visual cortex. Science 320, 1638–1643 (2008)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Kerr, J. N. D. & Denk, W. Imaging in vivo: watching the brain in action. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 9, 195–205 (2008)

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Authors
  1. Leonie Welberg
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Welberg, L. More than meets the eye. Nat Rev Neurosci 9, 586 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2458

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