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Objective To explore the effects of restraint water-immersion stress (RWIS) on the firing activities of pyramidal neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) of rats.Methods Multi-channel in vivo recording techniques were used to record firing activities of pyramidal neurons before and during 4-h RWIS in rats.Firing rates,inter-spike intervals and burst firing rates were taken as indices to study the influence of RWIS on neuronal firing activities.Results Twenty-five pyramidal neurons of 12 rats were recorded.The opposite patterns of firing activities were observed in two different classes of neurons,type A and type B neurons which account for 72％ and 28％,respectively.In type A neurons,inhibited firing activities were in direct proportion to the stress-exposure.Mean firing rates and mean burst firing rates were significantly reduced to (0.81 ± 0.11) Hz and (1.012 ± 0.50) counts/min after 4h constant RWIS compared with those before RWIS,(3.57 ± 0.63) Hz and (10.29 ± 3.04) counts/min.However,in type B neurons,firing activities were enhanced.After 2h constant RWIS,mean firing rates and mean burst firing rates were increased from (1.77±0.45) Hz and (2.01±0.73) counts/min to (2.67±0.74)Hz and (9.04±2.42) counts/min,respectively.Moreover,the percentage of spikes in bursts was significantly increased and mean inter-spike intervals were remarkably shortened.Interestingly,the effect of RWIS on type B neurons lasted for shorter time compared with its effect on type A neurons.Conclusion RWIS differentially affects the firing activity of pyramidal neuron in the MPFC,i.e.,inhibiting the firing activity of type A neurons,but enhancing the firing activity of type B neurons.
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Objective To analyze neural activity of in rat prefrontal cortex with the use of nonnegative matrix factorization with sparseness constrains (NMFs) as a methodology and to study how to express neural ensemble with higher precision during working memory task.Methods Experiment data were obtained from neural population activity in the period 5 s before and after the working memory event.From the zero point,the neuronal firing times were binned in windows of 200 ms with 50 ms overlapping.The normalized neuronal bin-count matrix is decomposed by NMFs into mixing matrix and source component matrix with sparseness constraints.Meaningful components were extracted to reconstruct the input by an inverse of NMFs transform.Results By analyzing the ten groups of data from 2 rats,with the numbers of the sparse sources of 10 and 15 respectively,explicit neural ensembles with the feature components were obtained in the sparse reconstructed activity.Comparing to rate coding,the spatiotemporal location of neural ensemble was more precisely detected.Conclusion The working memory information is encoded with neural ensemble activity.NMFs could find the sparse firing pattern robustly in neuron population activity.NMFs removes much redundancy and demonstrate the possibility to express neural ensemble with higher precision compared with rate coding,which would be helpful to infer correlations between cortical firing pattern and working memory event.
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Intracellular recordings in cerebellar slice preparation showed that applications of 4-AP altered the pattern of oscillatory firing activity in Purkinje cells (PCs), especially yielding pronounced changes in action potential shape. 4-AP increased the amplitude and duration of action potential significantly and decreased the spike frequency. After 4-AP application, the duration of bursting was prolonged and the duration of after-burst hyperpolarization was progressively shortened. In all PCs tested, the rhythmicity of oscillatory firing activity was abolished completely at the steady state. These results suggest that 4-AP-sensitive currents determine the shape and frequency of individual Ca(2+)-dependent action potentials as well as maintaining oscillatory firing activity in PCs.