, 1995 and Bruno and Sakmann, 2006). During early postnatal development, receptive fields in layer 4 emerge in a process that is driven

by whisker experience (Feldman and Brecht, 2005). The rapid development of receptive fields (Stern et al., 2001) and the experience-dependent synaptic plasticity of many cortical pathways also occur at this time (Bender et al., 2006, Allen et al., 2003 and Cheetham et al., 2007). Nevertheless, it is not clear how synaptic and anatomical changes at the critical level of individual connections interact to produce network architecture that is capable of processing sensory information. To understand Selleckchem SNS032 the development and organization of local circuits it is necessary to

investigate connectivity and the synaptic properties of connections between individual identified neurons in sufficient number to allow a quantitative description of the circuit. Mammalian neocortex is composed of heterogeneous, sparsely connected neuronal populations. This presents a major obstacle for the analysis of circuit connectivity because of the difficulty of identifying and stimulating individual neurons. Simultaneous electrophysiological recordings have been used to analyze multiple neurons (e.g., Thomson et al., 2002), but this is very time consuming, limiting the practicality of a detailed analysis of circuit development. Optical stimulation methods have been used (Nikolenko et al., 2007, Fulvestrant datasheet Matsuzaki et al., 2008, Dantzker and Callaway, 2000 and Petreanu et al., 2007), but, so far, such approaches have not been shown to be suitable for probing local circuit connections with single-cell resolution (but see Fino

and Yuste, 2011). This is largely due to relatively low spatial resolution of the excitation illumination profile leading science to stimulation of multiple and/or off-target cells. We now describe the development of a high-resoution 2P glutamate uncaging technique that reliably and selectively activates single, identified neurons in intact tissue. Combined with patch-clamp electrophysiology and 2P imaging of dendritic structure, we used this technique to analyze the developmental and experience-dependent changes in the layer 4 excitatory stellate cell network in barrel cortex. For glutamate uncaging to be useful in identifying synaptic connections with single-cell resolution, the photostimulation must fulfill six key criteria: (1) repeatable trial-by-trial activation of the targeted neuron, (2) reliable activation of the targeted neuron, (3) single-cell spatial resolution of uncaging, (4) specificity of activation to the visually identified targeted neuron and not neighbors or dendrites of passage, (5) unambiguous detection of evoked synaptic events, and (6) selective activation of monosynaptic connections.