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“Yes! We're all individuals!”: redundancy in neuronal circuits

Nature Neuroscience volume 13, pages 1306–1307 (2010)Cite this article

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In the mouse olfactory bulb, cells with common input respond to odors with similar firing rates but with different timing. This suggests that such 'sister' cells make independent and unique connections with local interneurons.

In small organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans, each neuron in a circuit often serves a distinct functional role; in mammals, with far more neurons, it is sometimes presumed that individual cells are more or less redundant, acting as members of a sizable pool of functionally equivalent neurons. However, the true extent of cellular redundancy in neuronal circuits is generally unknown; only in rare circumstances has it been possible to compare neurons that share common excitatory input. In this issue, Dhawale and colleagues1 describe experiments examining this issue in the mouse olfactory bulb. Using the light-activated channel channelrhodopsin-2 to identify downstream pairs of neurons ('sister' mitral or tufted cells) excited by the same pool of sensory inputs, they compared the responses of these pairs to a large collection of odorants. In average firing rate, sister cells showed high redundancy, mostly consistent with a view of coding by large pools of interchangeable cells. But the results also contained a twist: substantial differences between sister cells were revealed by examining how their firing was timed relative to the inhalation–exhalation cycle of sniffing. The outcome is consistent with a model in which sister cells make nearly independent connections with local interneurons, and it provides new evidence for parallel streams of representation in olfaction.

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Figure 1: Redundancy in the circuits of the olfactory bulb.

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  1. Timothy E. Holy is in the Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, USA.,

    Timothy E Holy

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  1. Timothy E Holy
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Correspondence to Timothy E Holy.

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Holy, T. “Yes! We're all individuals!”: redundancy in neuronal circuits. Nat Neurosci 13, 1306–1307 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1110-1306

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