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Review
. 2018 Aug 27:12:269.
doi: 10.3389/fncel.2018.00269. eCollection 2018.

Typology and Circuitry of Suppressed-by-Contrast Retinal Ganglion Cells

Jason Jacoby  1 , Gregory William Schwartz  1   2   3
Affiliations
Review

Typology and Circuitry of Suppressed-by-Contrast Retinal Ganglion Cells

Jason Jacoby et al. Front Cell Neurosci. .

Abstract

Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) relay ~40 parallel and independent streams of visual information, each encoding a specific feature of a visual scene, to the brain for further processing. The polarity of a visual neuron's response to a change in contrast is generally the first characteristic used for functional classification: ON cells increase their spike rate to positive contrast; OFF cells increase their spike rate for negative contrast; ON-OFF cells increase their spike rate for both contrast polarities. Suppressed-by-Contrast (SbC) neurons represent a less well-known fourth category; they decrease firing below a baseline rate for both positive and negative contrasts. SbC RGCs were discovered over 50 years ago, and SbC visual neurons have now been found in the thalamus and primary visual cortex of several mammalian species, including primates. Recent discoveries of SbC RGCs in mice have provided new opportunities for tracing upstream circuits in the retina responsible for the SbC computation and downstream targets in the brain where this information is used. We review and clarify recent work on the circuit mechanism of the SbC computation in these RGCs. Studies of mechanism rely on precisely defined cell types, and we argue that, like ON, OFF, and ON-OFF RGCs, SbC RGCs consist of more than one type. A new appreciation of the diversity of SbC RGCs will help guide future work on their targets in the brain and their roles in visual perception and behavior.

Keywords: contrast suppression; encoding visual information; feature selectivity; retina; retinal ganglion cells; suppressed-by-contrast; typology.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Morphology and physiology of Suppressed-by-Contrast (SbC) retinal neurons. (A) SbC sustained retinal ganglion cell (RGC) identified by Jacoby et al. (2015) and (B) ON delayed RGC identified by Mani and Schwartz (2017). Top image; representative RGC image showing ON dendrites (green) and OFF dendrites (magenta). Middle section; stratification profiles of several individual cells (gray) overlayed with an average trace (black), followed by stratification profile of corresponding Eyewire cell types. For all stratification profiles, the vertical red dotted lines represent the ON and OFF choline acetyl transferase (ChAT) bands. Bottom traces; peristimulus time histogram (PSTH) of 1 s light step from darkness from five different cells from five different retinas. Bottom traces shows response to 20 s light step in current clamp configuration (SbC sustained RGC) and cell attached mode (ON delayed RGC). For 20 s light step for the ON delayed RGC, a zoomed in trace of the red box inset is plotted to the right. (C) SbC transient RGC identified by Tien et al. (2015). Top image; representative image of an SbC transient RGC (ON dendrites = green; OFF dendrites = magenta). Middle section; stratification profile of representative image above using z-axis fluorescent profile. (D) ON delayed/SbC transient RGC recorded in CCK transgenic mouse line. Top image; representative image with CCK labeling with tdTomato (cyan), ON dendrites (green), OFF dendrites (magenta). Bottom traces; PSTH and cell attached spikes derived from 1 s light step from darkness recorded from the cell depicted above. All scale bars = 50 μm. Permission from the copyright holders was obtained for use and modification of previously published figures.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Contrast response profiles, intracellular currents and circuit diagrams of two types of SbC RGCs. (A) SbC sustained RGC, (B) ON delayed RGC, (C) SbC transient RGC. Top traces; cell attached spike responses to varying levels of Weber contrast stimuli to positive (left) and negative (right) contrast from mean illumination. Middle section; excitatory (blue) and inhibitory (red) intracellular currents in response to 100% positive and 100% negative contrast stimuli. Schematic circuit diagrams for the SbC sustained RGC (D) and ON delayed/SbC transient RGC (E). Permission from the copyright holders was obtained for use and modification of previously published figures.
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