Fig. 8: Starburst amacrine cells respond strongly to motion restricted to short distances. | Nature Communications

Fig. 8: Starburst amacrine cells respond strongly to motion restricted to short distances.

From: Center-surround interactions underlie bipolar cell motion sensitivity in the mouse retina

Fig. 8

a Left: for starburst amacrine cell (SAC) specific labeling, flex-GCaMP6f and ChAT-cre mice were crossed or ChAT-cre mice were injected with AAV encoding flex-GCaMP8f. Data from both sensors are included. Right: “1D noise” stimulus. b Clustering ROIs into groups based on their RFs. Left: example RF with leftward direction preference. Dotted line is cropped region used for clustering. Middle: Reconstructed components of the sparse PCA. Right: Plot of BIC for different number of clusters using Mixture of Gaussian clustering. Arrow: chosen number of clusters (8). c Left: example scan field (s.d. image) showing GCaMP6f expression in SACs. Right: ROIs color-coded by clusters determined in (b). d ROIs within each cluster with their average RFs. e Left: example ROI RF showing estimated motion trajectory (blue line). Right: motion trajectories for all ROIs color-coded by cluster (n = 2164 ROIs, 5 scan fields, 4 mice). f Left: histogram of the change in center position over time (delta distance) for ROIs from (e). Right: histogram of the RF velocity measured from line slopes in (e). g Moving bar stimulus (20 × 30 μm moving at 500 μm/s) traveling in two directions, either into (“in”) or out of (''out'') the field of view (FOV) and traversing a distance of 150 μm. Positions of different SACs diagrammed over the stimulus (green dendrites and somas), demonstrating that SACs on the left of the FOV will be better stimulated compared to SACs on the right. h Left: example scan field (s.d. image) showing GCaMP6f expression and example ROI (green). Right: Gaussian Process prediction for the response to each motion direction for the example ROI. i Direction preference (d') estimated from Gaussian Process predictions for all ROIs in example field in (h). j Additional fields in this dataset showing each ROIs' direction preference. k Histogram of d' for all ROIs (6237 ROIs/ 7 fields/ 5 mice). Significant with p < 0.001, one sample t-test.

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