Nelson Rebola

Location
CCO Auditorium
Virchowweg 4 | Berlin

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Please join us for the lecture, either in person or via Zoom.

Cortical GABAergic interneurons (INs) exhibit remarkable diversity, enabling finely tuned inhibitory control of cortical neural circuits. These INs primarily receive input through dendritic synapses. Yet, whether and how dendritic processing shapes their distinct functional roles remains unclear. In this last years we obtained evidence that two major cortical IN subtypes—somatostatin-expressing (SST) and parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons—exhibit fundamentally different strategies to distribute and integrate synaptic inputs along their dendrites. SST-INs display NMDAR-dependent supralinear integration and a uniform distribution of excitatory synapses. In contrast, PV-INs show sublinear integration and a higher density of synapses on proximal dendrites, with low NMDAR expression. I will present experimental as well as modeling data suggesting that while both dendritic integration strategies enhance effective synaptic efficacy in thin dendrites, they enable the extraction of distinct temporal features from input dynamics. Overall, our findings highlight how specialized dendritic processing across interneuron subtypes critically shapes the strength and timing of cortical inhibition.