eLife • Vol 10
Tightly coupled inhibitory and excitatory functional networks in the developing primary visual cortex
November 2021 • Haleigh N Mulholland, Bettina Hein, Matthias Kaschube, Gordon B. Smith
Intracortical inhibition plays a critical role in shaping activity patterns in the mature cortex. However, little is known about the structure of inhibition in early development prior to the onset of sensory experience, a time when spontaneous activity exhibits long-range correlations predictive of mature functional networks. Here, using calcium imaging of GABAergic neurons in the ferret visual cortex, we show that spontaneous activity in inhibitory neurons is already highly organized into distributed modular netw…