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Response characteristics of neurons to tone in dorsal nucleus of the lateral lemniscus of the mouse

SI Wen-Juan, CHENG Yan-Ling, YANG Dan-Dan, WANG Xin^*

College of Life Sciences and Hubei Key Laboratory of Genetic Regulation and Integrative Biology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China

Abstract

The dorsal nucleus of lateral lemniscus (DNLL) is a nucleus in the auditory ascending pathway, and casts inhibitory efferent projections to the inferior colliculus. Studies on the DNLL are less than studies on the auditory brain stem and inferior colliculus. To date, there is no information about response characteristics of neurons in DNLL of albino mouse. Under free field conditions, we used extracellular single unit recording to study the acoustic signal characteristics of DNLL neurons in Kunming mice (Mus musculus). Transient (36%) and ongoing (64%) firing patterns were found in 96 DNLL neurons. Neurons with different firing patterns have significant differences in characteristic frequency and minimal threshold. We recorded frequency tuning curves (FTCs) of 87 DNLL neurons. All of the FTCs exhibit an open “V” shape. There is no significant difference in FTCs between transient and ongoing neurons, but among the ongoing neurons, the FTCs of sustained neurons are sharper than those of onset plus sustained neurons and pauser neurons. Our results showed that the characteristic frequency of DNLL neurons of mice was not correlated with depth, supporting the view that the DNLL of mouse has no frequency topological organization through dorsal-ventral plane, which is different from cats and some other animals. Furthermore, by using rate-intensity function (RIF) analysis the mouse DNLL neurons can be classified as monotonic (60%), saturated (31%) and non-monotonic (8%) types. Each RIF type includes transient and ongoing firing patterns. Dynamic range of the transient firing pattern is smaller than that of ongoing firing ones (P < 0.01), suggesting that the inhibitory inputs may underlie the formation of transient firing pattern. Multiple firing patterns and intensity coding of DNLL neurons may derive from the projections from multiple auditory nuclei, and play different roles in auditory information processing.

Key words: dorsal nuclei of lateral lemniscus; firing pattern ; frequency tuning ; intensity tuning ; mouse

Received: 2015-07-08　　Accepted: 2015-12-21

Corresponding author: 王欣　　E-mail: xueyue312@aliyun.com

Citing This Article：

SI Wen-Juan, CHENG Yan-Ling, YANG Dan-Dan, WANG Xin. Response characteristics of neurons to tone in dorsal nucleus of the lateral lemniscus of the mouse. Acta Physiol Sin 2016; 68 (1): 1-11 (in Chinese with English abstract).