Person:

Polley, Daniel

Cortical neurons remap their receptive fields and rescale sensitivity to spared peripheral inputs following sensory nerve damage. To address how these plasticity processes are coordinated over the course of functional recovery, we tracked receptive field reorganization, spontaneous activity, and response gain from individual principal neurons in the adult mouse auditory cortex over a 50-day period surrounding either moderate or massive auditory nerve damage. We related the day-by-day recovery of sound processing to dynamic changes in the strength of intracortical inhibition from parvalbumin-expressing (PV) inhibitory neurons. Whereas the status of brainstem-evoked potentials did not predict the recovery of sensory responses to surviving nerve fibers, homeostatic adjustments in PV-mediated inhibition during the first days following injury could predict the eventual recovery of cortical sound processing weeks later. These findings underscore the potential importance of self-regulated inhibitory dynamics for the restoration of sensory processing in excitatory neurons following peripheral nerve injuries. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21452.001

Neurons at higher stages of sensory processing can partially compensate for a sudden drop in peripheral input through a homeostatic plasticity process that increases the gain on weak afferent inputs. Even after a profound unilateral auditory neuropathy where >95% of afferent synapses between auditory nerve fibers and inner hair cells have been eliminated with ouabain, central gain can restore cortical processing and perceptual detection of basic sounds delivered to the denervated ear. In this model of profound auditory neuropathy, auditory cortex (ACtx) processing and perception recover despite the absence of an auditory brainstem response (ABR) or brainstem acoustic reflexes, and only a partial recovery of sound processing at the level of the inferior colliculus (IC), an auditory midbrain nucleus. In this study, we induced a profound cochlear neuropathy with ouabain and asked whether central gain enabled a compensatory plasticity in the auditory thalamus comparable to the full recovery of function previously observed in the ACtx, the partial recovery observed in the IC, or something different entirely. Unilateral ouabain treatment in adult mice effectively eliminated the ABR, yet robust sound-evoked activity persisted in a minority of units recorded from the contralateral medial geniculate body (MGB) of awake mice. Sound driven MGB units could decode moderate and high-intensity sounds with accuracies comparable to sham-treated control mice, but low-intensity classification was near chance. Pure tone receptive fields and synchronization to broadband pulse trains also persisted, albeit with significantly reduced quality and precision, respectively. MGB decoding of temporally modulated pulse trains and speech tokens were both greatly impaired in ouabain-treated mice. Taken together, the absence of an ABR belied a persistent auditory processing at the level of the MGB that was likely enabled through increased central gain. Compensatory plasticity at the level of the auditory thalamus was less robust overall than previous observations in cortex or midbrain. Hierarchical differences in compensatory plasticity following sensorineural hearing loss may reflect differences in GABA circuit organization within the MGB, as compared to the ACtx or IC.