Effects of disinhibition on spatiotemporal pattern of neuronal first recruitment in neuronal networks

The propagation of neuronal activities is a key feature to understanding information processing in networks. The analysis based on first-spikes of bursts in turn plays an important role in the research of neuronal activity propagation. Our focus here is to investigate how spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal first-spikes are affected by disinhibition. Multi-electrode arrays were used to record stimulation-evoked bursts of multiple neurons in randomly cultured neuronal networks. Both the precise timing of and the rank relationships between first-spikes were analyzed. Compared with evoked bursts in the network’s native state, the precise first-spike latencies in its disinhibited state are more consistent and the propagation of its bursting activities is much faster. Additional points of interest are that disinhibited neuronal networks can be evoked to generate stable and distinguishable neuronal first recruitment spatiotemporal patterns specific to the stimulation site, and that the disinhibition may cause the original spatiotemporal patterns to change in a heterogeneous manner with regards to different propagation pathways.