Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience Systems Neuroscience

Abstract

direct or indirect pathway with high probability. More importantly, these differences disclose different integration processes for striatal inhibitory inputs. Major glutamatergic afferents to the striatum come from the cerebral cortex and are monosynaptic to both MSNs and interneurons (e.g., Kawaguchi et al., 1995). Suprathreshold cor-ticostriatal responses may exhibit plateau depolarizations lasting hundreds of milliseconds capable to fire trains of action potentials and are the first step for micro-circuitry integration and processing (Carrillo-Reid et al., 2008, 2009a). The present work demonstrates with the help of bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) transgenic mice expressing enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) under the control of D 1 or D 2 receptor promoters (BAC D 1 or D 2 eGFP mice), large, distinct and clear differences between the corticostriatal responses from direct and indirect pathway neurons. Moreover, these electrophysiological differences allowed us to predict, with high probability (P > 0.9), whether a recorded neuron, from rat or non-BAC mice, was going to react to SP or enkephalin (ENK) antibodies. Thereafter, we were able to demonstrate that these differences are greatly altered in