Experimentally induced visual projections into auditory thalamus and cortex

Retinal cells have been induced to project into the medial geniculate nucleus, the principal auditory thalamic nucleus, in newborn ferrets by reduction of targets of retinal axons in one hemisphere and creation of alternative terminal space for these fibers in the auditory thalamus. Many cells in the medial geniculate nucleus are then visually driven, have large receptive fields, and receive input from retinal ganglion cells with small somata and slow conduction velocities. Visual cells with long conduction latencies and large contralateral receptive fields can also be recorded in primary auditory cortex. Some visual cells in auditory cortex are direction selective or have oriented receptive fields that resemble those of complex cells in primary visual cortex. Thus, functional visual projections can be routed into nonvisual structures in higher mammals, suggesting that the modality of a sensory thalamic nucleus or cortical area may be specified by its inputs during development.     

Tuned responses of astrocytes and their influence on hemodynamic signals in the visual cortex

Astrocytes have long been thought to act as a support network for neurons, with little role in information representation or processing. We used two-photon imaging of calcium signals in the ferret visual cortex in vivo to discover that astrocytes, like neurons, respond to visual stimuli, with distinct spatial receptive fields and sharp tuning to visual stimulus features including orientation and spatial frequency. The stimulus-feature preferences of astrocytes were exquisitely mapped across the cortical surface, in close register with neuronal maps. The spatially restricted stimulus-specific component of the intrinsic hemodynamic mapping signal was highly sensitive to astrocyte activation, indicating that astrocytes have a key role in coupling neuronal organization to mapping signals critical for noninvasive brain imaging. Furthermore, blocking astrocyte glutamate transporters influenced the magnitude and duration of adjacent visually driven neuronal responses.