I placed myself with my laptop at the main entrance, close to the ethernet socket. It didn’t take long before colleagues and friends found me and so we’re camping out here together sharing our first experiences. The Dutch crowd is appalled by the price you pay for the food here: “Yesterday I paid 4.60! for a loaf of bread, plain bread!”. Some people worry that they can’t do experiments for a while: ” I can’t do anything for 10 days!”. Others have found alternative transport and borrowed or rented a bike. Apparently not wearing a helmet here is offensive?! How strange to experience these cultural differences: in Amsterdam wearing a helmet on a bike makes you kind of a wuss.

Yesterday, I went to the satellite of the Journal of Physiology on basket cells. I had my schedule mixed up so I was only on time for the talks by Ivan Soltesz and Ed Callaway. Judging from the list of speakers I think the symposium gave a pretty good overview on the two main types of basket cells most frequently studied, PV fast-spiking and the CCK non fast-spiking cells.

What struck me most from both of the talks was the specificity of the connectivity and the input to the two main types of basket cells and moreover, their functional differences. Ivan Soltesz showed that PV+ cells are inwardly rectifying whereas CCK+ cells are not and this difference could be contributed to expression of the CB1R. This was only found on pyramidal cells and not on granule cells of the hippocampus. Another functional difference between the two basket cell types is that CCK+ cells have a much higher IPSC amplitude than the PV+ cells, due to the expression of the Cl- channel CLC2, restricted to the somata.  And ofcourse it’s the PV+ cells that mostly project somatically. It was proposed that this could be a protective mechanism, preventing the PV+ cells from exerting too much influence (Foldy et al., 2010). During the discussion, the idea of Cl microdomains was suggested, much like Ca2+ microdomains. I’m looking forward to the TINS review (in press) on the diversity of inhibition by Krook-Magnuson.

And now some posters and then the long anticipated backyard brains (cheap electrophysiology experiments in your own backyard) at 207B.

Tags: basket cells

Categories: Uncategorized

---

Comments are closed