TY - JOUR TI - Intrinsic and synaptic membrane responses of murine spiral ganglion neurons DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3Q81G2F PY - 2015 AB - As the first neuronal element in the auditory pathway, spiral ganglion neurons are responsible for the initial signal encoding of complex sound information. Experiments presented in this dissertation explore the physiological basis of coding capacity in the murine postnatal spiral ganglion using electrophysiological and immunocytochemical techniques. Three separate and complete studies are presented. First, heterogeneity within each tonotopic region of the ganglion was characterized by the distribution patterns of calretinin and calbindin, two widely used markers for neuronal subpopulations (Liu and Davis, 2014). Second, the developmental establishment of diverse firing patterns in the spiral ganglion was investigated in embryonic cochlear epithelial cells in which neurogenic transcription factors were overexpressed (Nishimura et al., 2014). Finally, recordings made from acute cochlear whole-mounts preparations were made to assess the diverse intrinsic firing features in comparison to invading action potentials and passively-propagated synaptic potentials (Liu and Davis, in preparation). Results from these studies suggest that the physiological heterogeneity within the spiral ganglion may contribute to a population code essential for conveying the rich content of auditory information. KW - Neuroscience KW - Neurons KW - Synapses LA - eng ER -