The Huganir lab's latest results published in Nature
Congratulations to Dr. Richard Huganir and colleagues whose latest results on AMPA receptors were just published in Nature!
The following Department of Neuroscience labs also contributed to this work: Xinzhong Dong, Seth Blackshaw, Dwight E. Bergles, Solange P. Brown
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08027-2
The Huganir lab discovered that the presence of calcium-permeable AMPA receptors (CP-AMPARs) contributes to the low feature selectivity of parvalbumin-positive (PV) interneurons across different brain regions and species. The Huganir group found that PV interneurons have a low expression of the GluA2 subunit, leading to an abundance of CP-AMPARs. This low expression is conserved across various species, from ferrets to humans. When CP-AMPARs were replaced with calcium-impermeable AMPARs in PV interneurons, their orientation selectivity in the visual cortex and spatial selectivity in the hippocampus increased. The study also found that inducing CP-AMPAR expression in excitatory neurons, which usually have low CP-AMPAR levels, decreased their orientation selectivity. These findings suggest that CP-AMPARs play a crucial role in maintaining the low selectivity of PV interneurons and that this mechanism is conserved across different species and brain regions.