PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Katrin Franke
AU  - Philipp Berens
AU  - Timm Schubert
AU  - Matthias Bethge
AU  - Thomas Euler
AU  - Tom Baden
TI  - Balanced excitation and inhibition decorrelates visual feature representation in the mammalian inner retina
AID  - 10.1101/040642
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 040642
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/22/040642.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/22/040642.full
AB  - The retina extracts visual features for transmission to the brain. Different types of bipolar cell split the photoreceptor input into parallel channels and provide the excitatory drive for downstream visual circuits. Anatomically, mouse bipolar cell types have been described down to the ultrastructural level, but a similarly deep understanding of their functional diversity is lacking. By imaging light-driven glutamate release from more than 11,000 bipolar cell axon terminals in the intact retina, we here show that bipolar cell functional diversity is generated by the balanced interplay of dendritic excitatory inputs and axonal inhibitory inputs. The resultant centre and surround components of bipolar cell receptive fields interact to decorrelate bipolar cell output in the spatial and temporal domain. Our findings highlight the importance of inhibitory circuits in generating functionally diverse excitatory pathways and suggest that decorrelation of parallel visual pathways begins already at the second synapse of the mouse visual system.