Excitatory and inhibitory tonotopic bands in chinchilla inferior colliculus revealed by c-fos immuno-labeling.

We report on resting-level neural activity in inferior colliculus (IC) of auditory midbrain, and on tonotopic bands present following 90 minutes of pure-tone sound stimulation. Neurons activated by 6-kHz sound stimulation lay ventro-medial to those activated at 2 kHz. This is consistent with the known tonotopic organization of IC, and verified in the present report by multi-unit neuron response recordings in central nucleus of IC. Of particular interest, we observe a significant reduction in cell labeling adjacent to the tonotopic bands, and suggest that such decreases represent inhibitory regions. The width of the c-fos labeled bands and the extent of the lateral regions of reduced labeling closely match excitatory and lateral-inhibitory response areas of IC neurons.
PMID: 25158304 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Hearing Research - August 22, 2014 Category: Audiology Authors: D'Alessandro LM, Harrison RV Tags: Hear Res Source Type: research