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Dendrites

Dendritic processors

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 14, page 815 (2013)Cite this article

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Direction-selective retinal ganglion cells (DSGCs) fire action potentials when visual stimuli move across their receptive field in a particular direction (the 'preferred' direction), but are silent when the stimuli move in the opposing direction (the 'null' direction). Sivyer and Williams examined the contribution of active dendritic integration to direction selectivity in a subtype of DSGCs — namely, On-DSGCs — by recording from the soma and parent dendrites (the main branches of the dendritic tree) of these cells in rabbit retinal preparations that were exposed to moving light bars. Somatic recordings confirmed that On-DSGCs showed direction-selective responses. Interestingly, dendritic recordings made in the area of the dendritic tree that was first activated by light bars moving in the preferred direction showed that dendritic spikes preceded somatic responses, revealing that sensory input-induced dendritic spikes can drive action-potential firing.

Light-evoked excitation of DSGCs is mediated by bipolar cells, which form excitatory synapses onto DSGC terminal dendrites (which branch from the parent dendrites). The authors found that light evoked both large- and small-amplitude dendritic spikes, but only the former drove action potential generation. Thus, they reasoned that the small-amplitude spikes represent terminal dendrite spikes evoked by bipolar input that, in turn, trigger large-amplitude, parent dendritic responses.

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References

  1. Sivyer, B. & Williams, S. R. Direction selectivity is computed by active dendritic integration in retinal ganglion cells. Nature Neurosci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn.3565 (2013)

  2. Smith, S. L. et al. Dendritic spikes enhance stimulus selectivity in cortical neurons in vivo. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12600 (2013)

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  1. Darran Yates
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Yates, D. Dendritic processors. Nat Rev Neurosci 14, 815 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3644

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