Refinement and Pattern Formation in Neural Circuits by the Interaction of Traveling Waves with Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity

Traveling waves in the developing brain are a prominent source of highly correlated spiking activity that may instruct the refinement of neural circuits. A candidate mechanism for mediating such refinement is spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP), which translates correlated activity patterns into changes in synaptic strength. To assess the potential of these phenomena to build useful structure in developing neural circuits, we examined the interaction of wave activity with STDP rules in simple, biologically plausible models of spiking neurons. We derive an expression for the synaptic strength dynamics showing that, by mapping the time dependence of STDP into spatial interactions, traveling waves can build periodic synaptic connectivity patterns into feedforward circuits with a broad class of experimentally observed STDP rules. The spatial scale of the connectivity patterns increases with wave speed and STDP time constants. We verify these results with simulations and demonstrate their robustness to likely sources of noise. We show how this pattern formation ability, which is analogous to solutions of reaction-diffusion systems that have been widely applied to biological pattern formation, can be harnessed to instruct the refinement of postsynaptic receptive fields. Our results hold for rich, complex wave patterns in two dimensions and over several orders of magnitude in wave speeds and STDP time constants, and they provide predictions that can be tested under existing experimental paradigms. Our model generalizes across brain areas and STDP rules, allowing broad application to the ubiquitous occurrence of traveling waves and to wave-like activity patterns induced by moving stimuli

Sodium chloride drives autoimmune disease by the induction of pathogenic TH17 cells

There has been a marked increase in the incidence of autoimmune diseases in the last half-century. While the underlying genetic basis of this class of diseases has recently been elucidated implicating predominantly immune response genes(1), changes in environmental factors must ultimately be driving this increase. The newly identified population of interleukin (IL)-17 producing CD4(+) helper T cells (Th17 cells) plays a pivotal role in autoimmune diseases(2). Pathogenic IL-23 dependent Th17 cells have been shown to be critical for the development of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), an animal model for multiple sclerosis (MS), and genetic risk factors associated with MS are related to the IL23/Th17 pathway(1, 2). However, little is known regarding the environmental factors that directly influence Th17 cells. Here we show that increased salt (sodium chloride; NaCl) concentrations found locally under physiological conditions in vivo dramatically boost the induction of murine and human Th17 cells. High-salt conditions activate the p38/MAPK pathway involving the tonicity-responsive enhancer binding protein (TonEBP/NFAT5) and the serum/glucocorticoid-regulated kinase 1 (SGK1) during cytokine-induced Th17 polarization. Gene silencing or chemical inhibition of p38/MAPK, NFAT5 or SGK1 abrogates the high-salt induced Th17 cell development. The Th17 cells generated under high-salt display a highly pathogenic and stable phenotype characterized by the up-regulation of the pro-inflammatory cytokines GM-CSF, TNFα and IL-2. Moreover, mice fed with a high-salt diet develop a more severe form of EAE, in line with augmented central nervous system infiltrating and peripherally induced antigen specific Th17 cells. Thus, increased dietary salt intake might represent an environmental risk factor for the development of autoimmune diseases through the induction of pathogenic Th17 cells