Cell Reports (Mar 2023)

Thalamic control of sensory processing and spindles in a biophysical somatosensory thalamoreticular circuit model of wakefulness and sleep

  • Elisabetta Iavarone,
  • Jane Simko,
  • Ying Shi,
  • Marine Bertschy,
  • María García-Amado,
  • Polina Litvak,
  • Anna-Kristin Kaufmann,
  • Christian O’Reilly,
  • Oren Amsalem,
  • Marwan Abdellah,
  • Grigori Chevtchenko,
  • Benoît Coste,
  • Jean-Denis Courcol,
  • András Ecker,
  • Cyrille Favreau,
  • Adrien Christian Fleury,
  • Werner Van Geit,
  • Michael Gevaert,
  • Nadir Román Guerrero,
  • Joni Herttuainen,
  • Genrich Ivaska,
  • Samuel Kerrien,
  • James G. King,
  • Pramod Kumbhar,
  • Patrycja Lurie,
  • Ioannis Magkanaris,
  • Vignayanandam Ravindernath Muddapu,
  • Jayakrishnan Nair,
  • Fernando L. Pereira,
  • Rodrigo Perin,
  • Fabien Petitjean,
  • Rajnish Ranjan,
  • Michael Reimann,
  • Liviu Soltuzu,
  • Mohameth François Sy,
  • M. Anıl Tuncel,
  • Alexander Ulbrich,
  • Matthias Wolf,
  • Francisco Clascá,
  • Henry Markram,
  • Sean L. Hill

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 42, no. 3
p. 112200

Abstract

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Summary: Thalamoreticular circuitry plays a key role in arousal, attention, cognition, and sleep spindles, and is linked to several brain disorders. A detailed computational model of mouse somatosensory thalamus and thalamic reticular nucleus has been developed to capture the properties of over 14,000 neurons connected by 6 million synapses. The model recreates the biological connectivity of these neurons, and simulations of the model reproduce multiple experimental findings in different brain states. The model shows that inhibitory rebound produces frequency-selective enhancement of thalamic responses during wakefulness. We find that thalamic interactions are responsible for the characteristic waxing and waning of spindle oscillations. In addition, we find that changes in thalamic excitability control spindle frequency and their incidence. The model is made openly available to provide a new tool for studying the function and dysfunction of the thalamoreticular circuitry in various brain states.

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