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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms
State-Dependent Organization of Microscale Functional Circuitry in Mouse Visual Cortex
Rahul Biswas1, Hasika Wickrama Senevirathne2, Yujing Wang3, Jiang Zhang3, Somabha Mukherjee3, Reza Abbasi-Asl1; 1University of California, San Francisco, 2Singapore National Eye Center, 3National University of Singapore
Presenter: Rahul Biswas
Brain state modulates sensory processing across visual cortex, yet how it relates to the organization of functional circuitry at the level of individual neurons and cell types remains largely unknown. To address this, we constructed one of the largest microscale directed functional circuit maps in mouse visual cortex from calcium imaging of more than 57,000 neurons across four visual areas and five cortical layers. Using a time-aware causal inference framework, we found that intra-areal connections dominate across arousal states, consistent with experimental findings on the local bias of cortical anatomy. Among intra-areal connections, anterolateral area (AL) had the highest density, and among inter-areal connections, the AL↔rostrolateral area (RL) axis formed the strongest pathway. Laminar organization showed layer 5 dominance in within-area connection density across both arousal states, with deep-layer subtypes carrying the strongest cell-type connections. Spatial extent of functional connections was greater in high arousal, with comparable expansion for both excitatory-to-excitatory and excitatory-to-inhibitory subtypes. Across 6,597 electron-microscopy reconstructions of neuron pairs, synaptically connected pairs were 3.5-fold more likely to carry a functional connection than synaptically absent pairs, in both arousal states. In stimulus-driven response prediction, neuron pairs with stronger functional connections exhibited more similar predictive performance in both states, with performance varying by layer and cell type. Overall, our findings map, at single-neuron resolution, the multi-scale organization of directed functional circuitry in mouse visual cortex across brain states.
Topic Area: Computational Models of Vision & Visual Cortex