Fig. 5: Ongoing and evoked population activity patterns in auditory thalamus differ in both awake and anesthetized states.

a, Schematic of the procedure for two-photon Ca²⁺ imaging of thalamocortical terminals expressing GCaMP6s in layer 1 of the auditory cortex. Below: calcium trace (black) with spike time estimates (red) for a sample terminal. b, Population raster plot in the awake state (each line represents the spontaneous spiking pattern of a thalamocortical terminal). c, Same as b under light isoflurane anesthesia (1.3%). d, For an example recording session, Pearson’s correlation matrix between spontaneous assemblies of thalamocortical terminals sorted by hierarchical clustering and single trial sound response patterns (whether or not a population event was detected), sorted sound by sound (12 trials per sound). e, Same as d under anesthesia. Lower correlation inside black and orange frames (similarity) compared with correlations along the diagonal (reproducibility) indicates that spontaneous and evoked patterns are different. f–k, Relationship between reproducibility (abscissa) and similarity (ordinate) of sound-evoked and spontaneous patterns for all sounds and sessions. Statistics across sessions are given on the histograms on the right-hand side (f–k: P = 0.016, paired Wilcoxon’s sgned-rank test, n = 7 mice). Spontaneous and evoked patterns are dissimilar in both awake (f and g) and anesthetized (j and k) states (gray, line of equality; dark blue, data trend) and neither of them kept similitude passing from one state to another (h–j). AW, awake; ISO, isoflurane anesthesia; post., poststimulation; pre., before stimulation; repro., reproducibility; Sim., similarity; spont., spontaneous; TH, thalamus. ^*P < 0.05. For all box-and-whisker plots, the red mark indicates the median, and the bottom and top edges of the box indicate the 25th and 75th percentiles, respectively. The whiskers extend to the extreme data points. All tests are two sided.

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