Principles of visual cortex excitatory microcircuit organization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Synapse-specific connectivity and dynamics determine microcircuit function but are challenging to explore with classic paired recordings due to their low throughput. We therefore implemented optomapping, a ∼100-fold faster two-photon optogenetic method. In mouse primary visual cortex (V1), we optomapped 30,454 candidate inputs to reveal 1,790 excitatory inputs to pyramidal, basket, and Martinotti cells. Across these cell types, log-normal distribution of synaptic efficacies emerged as a principle. For pyramidal cells, optomapping reproduced the canonical circuit but unexpectedly uncovered that the excitation of basket cells concentrated to layer 5 and that of Martinotti cells dominated in layer 2/3. The excitation of basket cells was stronger and reached farther than the excitation of pyramidal cells, which may promote stability. Short-term plasticity surprisingly depended on cortical layer in addition to target cell. Finally, optomapping revealed an overrepresentation of shared inputs for interconnected layer-6 pyramidal cells. Thus, by resolving the throughput problem, optomapping uncovered hitherto unappreciated principles of V1 structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.153 | 0.035 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".