Key to this concept is that synaptic scaling affects

all of a neuron’s synapses, maintaining the relative synaptic weights of the inputs (Turrigiano et al., 1998, Desai et al., 2002 and Goel et al., 2006). Accordingly, it should in theory not matter from which population of a neuron’s synapses the sample is drawn. While homeostatic SCR7 order mechanisms—specifically synaptic scaling—have been shown to underlie homeostatic restoration of activity levels in cortical (Turrigiano et al., 1998) or hippocampal (Burrone et al., 2002) cultures, it had not been tested whether synaptic scaling or other homeostatic mechanisms are associated with changes in cellular activity levels in vivo. Here, in behaving mice expressing a genetically encoded calcium indicator, we show that activity levels in the visual cortex are decreased after retinal input removal. We believe that this decrease in activity measured at 6 and 18 hr postlesion is predominantly a result of the removal of all retinal activity (both visually evoked and spontaneous), possibly combined Dasatinib research buy with

presynaptic changes that we measured as a decrease in mEPSC frequency at 18 hr. Note, however, that we cannot rule out that cortical activity levels are influenced by rapid plasticity in these first 6–18 hr. We then showed that synaptic scaling occurs with the precise time course over which cortical activity levels increase, which we interpret as a homeostatic response to this activity loss. These data demonstrate in vivo that homeostatic mechanisms correlate with 17-DMAG (Alvespimycin) HCl changes in cellular activity levels. Consistent with previous studies showing that cells in visual cortex (Livingstone et al., 1996, Gallant et al., 1998, Vinje and Gallant,

2000, Fiser et al., 2004 and Keller et al., 2012) or the LGN (Linden et al., 2009) show substantial activity unrelated to visual input, the removal of all visual input by complete lesions of both retinae decreased activity in visual cortex of behaving mice by only 50%–60%. This limited decrease in activity was, however, clearly sufficient to evoke homeostatic mechanisms after deprivation, showing that homeostatic changes can occur without completely silencing the cortex. As studies of homeostatic plasticity thus far have either completely removed activity—typically in culture by TTX application (Turrigiano et al., 1998 and Burrone et al., 2002)—or did not measure activity levels after deprivation (Desai et al., 2002, Goel and Lee, 2007, Maffei and Turrigiano, 2008, Gao et al., 2010 and Lambo and Turrigiano, 2013), these results provide important evidence that mechanisms of homeostasis also occur when activity levels are changing more moderately. The homeostatic mechanisms demonstrated with our in vivo paradigm—synaptic scaling and, with a delay, reduced inhibition—probably play a role in the observed increases in cortical activity; however, they are unlikely to be solely responsible.