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Functional consequences of animal-to-animal variation in circuit parameters

Nature Neuroscience volume 12, pages 1424–1430 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

How different are the neuronal circuits for a given behavior across individual animals? To address this question, we measured multiple cellular and synaptic parameters in individual preparations to see how they correlated with circuit function, using neurons and synapses in the pyloric circuit of the stomatogastric ganglion of the crab Cancer borealis. There was considerable preparation-to-preparation variability in the strength of two identified synapses, in the amplitude of a modulator-evoked current and in the expression of six ion channel genes. Nonetheless, we found strong correlations across preparations among these parameters and attributes of circuit performance. These data illustrate the importance of making multidimensional measurements from single preparations for understanding how variability in circuit output is related to the variability of multiple circuit parameters.

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Figure 1: Variability of pyloric circuit output across crabs.
Figure 2: Variability of synaptic inputs to the LP neuron.
Figure 3: Variability of IMI in the LP neuron.
Figure 4: Correlations among synaptic current properties, IMI and LP neuron firing properties.
Figure 5: Correlations between mRNA expression and network output.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S.R. Pulver and L.S. Tang for contributing data. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health grants NS17813 (E.M.), MH46742 (E.M.) and NS50928 (A.L.T.), James S. McDonnell Foundation grant 220020065 (E.M.) and National Science Foundation grant IOB-0615160 (D.J.S.).

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Author notes

  1. Jean-Marc Goaillard

    Present address: Present address: INSERM UMR 641, Faculté de Médecine-Secteur Nord, Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France.,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Volen Center and Biology Department, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

    Jean-Marc Goaillard, Adam L Taylor & Eve Marder

  2. Biological Sciences, University of Missouri at Columbia, Columbia, Missouri, USA

    David J Schulz

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  1. Jean-Marc Goaillard
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  2. Adam L Taylor
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Contributions

J.-M.G. conducted the majority of the electrophysiological experiments, analyzed data and contributed to writing the manuscript. A.L.T. analyzed data, conducted experiments and contributed to writing the manuscript. D.J.S. performed all of the quantitative single-cell PCR. E.M. supervised the experiments and contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jean-Marc Goaillard.

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Goaillard, JM., Taylor, A., Schulz, D. et al. Functional consequences of animal-to-animal variation in circuit parameters. Nat Neurosci 12, 1424–1430 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2404

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