Precise excitation-inhibition balance controls gain and timing in the hippocampus

  1. Aanchal Bhatia
  2. Sahil Moza
  3. Upinder Singh Bhalla  Is a corresponding author
  1. Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India

Abstract

Excitation-inhibition (EI) balance controls excitability, dynamic range, and input gating in many brain circuits. Subsets of synaptic input can be selected or 'gated' by precise modulation of finely tuned EI balance, but assessing the granularity of EI balance requires combinatorial analysis of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. Using patterned optogenetic stimulation of mouse hippocampal CA3 neurons, we show that hundreds of unique CA3 input combinations recruit excitation and inhibition with a nearly identical ratio, demonstrating precise EI balance at the hippocampus. Crucially, the delay between excitation and inhibition decreases as excitatory input increases from a few synapses to tens of synapses. This creates a dynamic millisecond-range window for postsynaptic excitation, controlling membrane depolarization amplitude and timing via subthreshold divisive normalization. We suggest that this combination of precise EI balance and dynamic EI delays forms a general mechanism for millisecond-range input gating and subthreshold gain control in feedforward networks.

Data availability

All simulation data and code are open source and online, available at https://github.com/sahilm89/linearity. Experimental data is available on Dryad (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f456k4f) .

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Aanchal Bhatia

    National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-4709-115X
  2. Sahil Moza

    National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-2225-8841
  3. Upinder Singh Bhalla

    National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India
    For correspondence
    bhalla@ncbs.res.in
    Competing interests
    Upinder Singh Bhalla, Reviewing editor, eLife.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1722-5188

Funding

University Grants Commission (UGC/ISF No. F 6-18/2014 (IC))

  • Upinder Singh Bhalla

Israel Science Foundation (UGC/ISF No. F 6-18/2014 (IC))

  • Upinder Singh Bhalla

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (Senior Research Fellowship)

  • Sahil Moza

National Centre for Biological Sciences (Graduate Student Fellowship)

  • Aanchal Bhatia
  • Sahil Moza
  • Upinder Singh Bhalla

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Ronald L Calabrese, Emory University, United States

Ethics

Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures were approved by the National Centre for Biological Sciences Institutional Animal Ethics Committee (Protocol number USB-19-1/2011), in accordance with the guidelines of the Government of India (animal facility CPCSEA registration number 109/1999/CPCSEA) and equivalent guidelines of the Society for Neuroscience. CA3-cre (C57BL/6-Tg (Grik4-cre) G32-4Stl/J mice, Stock number 006474) were obtained from Jackson Laboratories. The animals were housed in a temperature controlled environment with a 14-h light: 10h dark cycle, with ad libitum food and water.

Version history

  1. Received: November 6, 2018
  2. Accepted: April 10, 2019
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: April 25, 2019 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: May 14, 2019 (version 2)
  5. Version of Record updated: June 24, 2021 (version 3)

Copyright

© 2019, Bhatia et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 9,645
    views
  • 1,091
    downloads
  • 72
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Aanchal Bhatia
  2. Sahil Moza
  3. Upinder Singh Bhalla
(2019)
Precise excitation-inhibition balance controls gain and timing in the hippocampus
eLife 8:e43415.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43415

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43415

Further reading

    1. Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
    2. Neuroscience
    Maximilian Nagel, Marco Niestroj ... Marc Spehr
    Research Article

    In most mammals, conspecific chemosensory communication relies on semiochemical release within complex bodily secretions and subsequent stimulus detection by the vomeronasal organ (VNO). Urine, a rich source of ethologically relevant chemosignals, conveys detailed information about sex, social hierarchy, health, and reproductive state, which becomes accessible to a conspecific via vomeronasal sampling. So far, however, numerous aspects of social chemosignaling along the vomeronasal pathway remain unclear. Moreover, since virtually all research on vomeronasal physiology is based on secretions derived from inbred laboratory mice, it remains uncertain whether such stimuli provide a true representation of potentially more relevant cues found in the wild. Here, we combine a robust low-noise VNO activity assay with comparative molecular profiling of sex- and strain-specific mouse urine samples from two inbred laboratory strains as well as from wild mice. With comprehensive molecular portraits of these secretions, VNO activity analysis now enables us to (i) assess whether and, if so, how much sex/strain-selective ‘raw’ chemical information in urine is accessible via vomeronasal sampling; (ii) identify which chemicals exhibit sufficient discriminatory power to signal an animal’s sex, strain, or both; (iii) determine the extent to which wild mouse secretions are unique; and (iv) analyze whether vomeronasal response profiles differ between strains. We report both sex- and, in particular, strain-selective VNO representations of chemical information. Within the urinary ‘secretome’, both volatile compounds and proteins exhibit sufficient discriminative power to provide sex- and strain-specific molecular fingerprints. While total protein amount is substantially enriched in male urine, females secrete a larger variety at overall comparatively low concentrations. Surprisingly, the molecular spectrum of wild mouse urine does not dramatically exceed that of inbred strains. Finally, vomeronasal response profiles differ between C57BL/6 and BALB/c animals, with particularly disparate representations of female semiochemicals.