, 2005, Magnusson et al., 2005 and Chirila et al., 2007). MSO neurons are extremely sensitive to the coincident arrival of excitatory events, and they encode the sound localization cue called interaural time difference. In the two weeks after hearing onset at P12, inhibitory (IPSP) and excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSP) become much faster, low-threshold-activating potassium currents increase, and the AP threshold current rises (Figure 9A). These results are broadly consistent with developmental findings from several other auditory brainstem nuclei (Sanes, 1993, Kandler and Friauf, 1995, Chuhma and Ohmori, 1998, Taschenberger and von Gersdorff, 2000, Brenowitz and
Trussell, Selleck BMS-354825 2001, Balakrishnan et al., 2003, Nakamura and Takahashi, 2007, Gao and Lu, selleck chemicals llc 2008 and Sanchez et al., 2010). The rapid functional development of synapses throughout the auditory neuraxis must surely have interesting correlates in auditory perception; however, it will be tricky to disentangle the relative contribution of CNS changes from those occurring concomitantly in the middle ear and cochlea. Since auditory deprivation appears to delay CNS maturation (below), it may be possible to ascertain the contribution of central properties by comparing the perceptual abilities of control animals to those reared with moderate hearing loss. It is possible that there
are late-developing synaptic properties that help to explain limitations in juvenile perceptual skills, but these properties are found at higher levels of the CNS. However, intracellular recordings in brain slices and in anesthetized animals suggest that synaptic transmission matures rapidly in cortex as well. When neuron pairs are recorded in mouse auditory cortex brain slices, such that synaptic potentials can be quantified for individual connections, the IPSP and EPSP amplitudes decline by about 30% during the two weeks after hearing onset (Figure 9B). This decline may be explained by a 50% reduction in the postsynaptic neurons’ input Fossariinae resistances (Oswald and Reyes, 2008 and Oswald and
Reyes, 2011). In fact, some inhibitory synaptic currents display a dramatic increase in amplitude during this same period, suggesting that they are compensating for the drop in resistance (Takesian et al., 2010). When whole-cell voltage-clamp recordings are obtained in vivo from the auditory cortex of anesthetized rat, the amplitudes of sound-evoked IPSPs and EPSPs do not change significantly between the onset of hearing and adulthood (Sun et al., 2010 and Dorrn et al., 2010). These synaptic events do display age-dependent alterations such as frequency selectivity and response latency, but these changes also tend to occur soon after hearing onset. Because few late-developing cellular properties have been described, one possibility is that immaturities are only observable within the context of a network.