Below is the significance statement of the paper published on June 22, 2022, in JNeurosci and authored by Nikolaos Kladisios, Linda Fischer, Florian Jenzen, Michael Rebhan, Christian Leibold, and Felix Felmy
Auditory information processing in the brainstem is a prerequisite for generating our auditory representation of the environment. Thereby, many processing steps rely on temporally precise filtering. Precise feed forward inhibition is a key motif in auditory brainstem processing and produced through sign inversion at several large somatic excitatory synapses. A particular feature of the ventral nucleus of the lateral lemniscus is to produce temporally precise onset inhibition with little temporal variance independent of sound intensity. Our cell-physiology and modeling data explain how the synaptic characteristics of different current components and their short-term plasticity are tuned to establish sound intensity-invariant onset inhibition that is crucial for filtering out spurious frequency information.
