reduced responsiveness to long-term monocular deprivation of parvalbumin neurons assessed by c-fos staining in rat visual cortex减少长期单眼剥夺小清蛋白的神经元反应评估c-fos染色在大鼠视觉皮质.pdfVIP

Reduced Responsiveness to Long-Term Monocular Deprivation of Parvalbumin Neurons Assessed by c-Fos Staining in Rat Visual Cortex 1 1 2,3 1,3 2,3 Marco Mainardi , Silvia Landi , Nicoletta Berardi , Lamberto Maffei , Tommaso Pizzorusso * 1 Laboratory of Neurobiology, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy, 3 Institute of Neuroscience, CNR, Pisa, Italy Abstract Background: It is generally assumed that visual cortical cells homogeneously shift their ocular dominance (OD) in response to monocular deprivation (MD), however little experimental evidence directly supports this notion. By using immunohistochemistry for the activity-dependent markers c-Fos and Arc, coupled with staining for markers of inhibitory cortical sub-populations, we studied whether long-term MD initiated at P21 differentially affects visual response of inhibitory neurons in rat binocular primary visual cortex. Methodology/Principal Findings: The inhibitory markers GAD67, parvalbumin (PV), calbindin (CB) and calretinin (CR) were used. Visually activated Arc did not colocalize with PV and was discarded from further studies. MD decreased visually induced c-Fos activation in GAD67 and CR positive neurons. The CB population responded to MD with a decrease of CB expression, while PV cells did not show any effect of MD on c-Fos expression. The persistence of c-Fos expression induced by deprived eye stimulation in PV cells is not likely to be due to a particularly low threshold for activity-dependent c-Fos induction. Indeed, c-Fos induction by increasing concentrations of