Integrative mechanisms controlling directional sensitivity of an identified sensory interneuron

Several identified interneurons in the cricket cercal afferent system display directional sensitivity to wind stimuli: the spike frequency of these cells depends on the wind direction with respect to the animal's body. Factors determining the directional sensitivity of one of these identified interneurons (interneuron 10-3) were studied in detail. This cell has 3 dendritic branches that arborize in 3 distinct regions of the terminal abdominal ganglion. Using 2 independent methods, it was demonstrated that the dendrites have different receptive fields to wind stimuli. First, small patches of filiform hairs, whose afferents projected to individual dendrites, were isolated and selectively stimulated. In each case the response of the cell matched the receptive field of the afferents in the patch. Second, a laser beam directed through the stereo dissecting microscope was used to photoinactivate small portions of the cell in situ during intracellular recording. By isolating or ablating individual dendrites, the contributions of each of the 3 dendrites to the overall receptive field were assessed. Although the receptive field of the whole cell could be predicted by a summation of the receptive fields of all 3 dendrites, the precise directional sensitivity of the cell could not be predicted by a simple linear summation of the receptive fields of each dendrite. Two factors were found to account for this nonlinearity of summation. The first factor was polysynaptic inhibition from other interneurons within the terminal abdominal ganglion. Wind directions that activate inhibition in interneuron 10-3 were identified, and the specific classes of filiform afferents that activate the inhibitory pathway were determined. The net effect of the inhibition was to "sharpen" the directional sensitivity of 1–3 by selectively decreasing the cell's response to specific excitatory inputs. The second factor that contributed to directional sensitivity was the complex electroanatomy of the interneuron. The probable location of the spike-initiating zone (SIZ) was determined by using the laser photoinactivation technique. The relative efficacies of synaptic inputs onto the 3 different branches were then interpreted with respect to their different electrotonic distances from the SIZ. On the basis of the data obtained in this report, we present a qualitative model for the basis of directional sensitivity in this cell.