New paper on cortical GABAergic neurons’ afferent connections: the thalamus takes care to excite them

In a recent publication in iSCIENCE, derived from the thesis of our former PhD student Michael Feyerabend, we could provide evidence that lemniscal and paralemniscal thalamus reliably excite barrel cortical GABAergic neurons, which express VIP or SST. Rather surprising, independent of laminar location, nearly all optogenetically tested cells responded with a short-latency EPSC to short laser light pulses. This suggests that both subpopulations of GABAergic neurons are able to impose feedforward-inhibition to cortical circuits and thus are integral parts of tactile information processing. Please read the paper, if you want to know more.