Are dendritic integration rules in retinal ganglion cells adapted to the statistics of the natural environment?

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Philipp Berens; Professor Dr. Thomas Euler
• Subject Area: Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology ; Molecular Biology and Physiology of Neurons and Glial Cells
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426723648

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Animals live in environments in which different visual information is present in distinct parts of the visual field and, hence, falls onto different retinal regions. For example, the world of many terrestrial animals is bisected by the horizon: For mice, predators are more likely to appear in the upper visual field, whereas food is rather found in the lower visual field. To encode survival-relevant information more efficiently and robustly, the visual system is thought to be adapted to the statistics of the natural environment. This adaptation starts already in the retina, which often can be divided into different zones: in these, for example, the spectral composition of the photoreceptor population seems to be specialized for distinct tasks, such as raptor detection in mice or hunting paramecia in zebrafish larvae. Currently, we are only at the beginning of understanding these regionspecific adaptations. However, without an in-depth knowledge of the regional circuits and the underlying adaptational mechanisms, a comprehensive understanding of how the retina processes an animals’ natural visual environment is difficult. In this project, we focussed on the output neurons of the retinal network, the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). In these cells, changes in dendritic morphology are often a tell-tale sign for regional specializations. Therefore, we studied the rules according to which RGC dendritic arbours integrate input from the presynaptic circuitry and evaluated if and how these rules change across the retina. We asked how such adaptations could subserve efficient processing of the natural visual environment. Specifically, using functional dendritic imaging, morphological reconstruction, and computational modelling, we studied how different types of mouse RGCs process the synaptic input of the upstream circuitry and how regional variations in an RGC type’s dendritic integration profile may contribute to encoding the natural scene encountered by this retinal region.

Publications

• Type-specific dendritic integration in mouse retinal ganglion cells. Nature Communications, 11(1).
  Ran, Yanli; Huang, Ziwei; Baden, Tom; Schubert, Timm; Baayen, Harald; Berens, Philipp; Franke, Katrin & Euler, Thomas
  
• Analytic Pearson residuals for normalization of single-cell RNA-seq UMI data. Genome Biology, 22(1).
  Lause, Jan; Berens, Philipp & Kobak, Dmitry
  
• Estimating smooth and sparse neural receptive fields with a flexible spline basis. Neurons, Behavior, Data analysis, and Theory, 5(3).
  Huang, Ziwei; Ran, Yanli; Oesterle, Jonathan; Euler, Thomas & Berens, Philipp
  
• Retinal horizontal cells use different synaptic sites for global feedforward and local feedback signaling. Current Biology, 32(3), 545-558.e5.
  Behrens, Christian; Yadav, Shubhash Chandra; Korympidou, Maria M.; Zhang, Yue; Haverkamp, Silke; Irsen, Stephan; Schaedler, Anna; Lu, Xiaoyu; Liu, Zhuohe; Lause, Jan; St-Pierre, François; Franke, Katrin; Vlasits, Anna; Dedek, Karin; Smith, Robert G.; Euler, Thomas; Berens, Philipp & Schubert, Timm
  
• Compound models and Pearson residuals for single-cell RNA-seq data without UMIs.
  Lause, Jan; Ziegenhain, Christoph; Hartmanis, Leonard; Berens, Philipp & Kobak, Dmitry
  
• Sustained ON alpha retinal ganglion cells in the temporal retina exhibit task-specific regional adaptions in dendritic signal integration.
  Oesterle, Jonathan; Ran, Yanli; Stahr, Paul; Kerr, Jason ND; Schubert, Timm; Berens, Philipp & Euler, Thomas