Postnatal development of GABAA receptor-mediated inhibition in primate prefrontal cortex

GONZALEZ-BURGOS G; YOSHINO H; MIYAMAE T; PAFUNDO DE; ROTARU D; LEWIS DA

Washington DC

Congreso; 41st annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience; 2011

Society for Neuroscience

In the rodent brain, cortical GABAA receptor-mediated synaptic inhibition (GABAAR-I) is immature at birth and reaches adult-like state by 2-3 weeks of postnatal development. Importantly, due to the marked rodent-primate differences in total lifespan, developmental stages and the transitions between stages last significantly longer in primates. Therefore, the absolute time window during which activity, experience and environmental factors shape cortical circuit development may be markedly expanded in primates compared to rodents. Postnatal development of the functional properties of GABA synapses in circuits of the primate neocortex is, however, largely unexplored. We thus studied the postnatal developmental trajectory of GABAAR-I in macaque monkey dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). We recorded GABAAR-mediated IPSCs from layer 3 pyramidal neurons visually-identified in area 46 of brain slices from the DLPFC. Animals (2/group) were divided into 4 age groups (ages in months; # of cells/group): neonatal (1, 1.5; 45), pre-adolescents (9.5, 12.5; 71), adolescents (34, 34.5; 52), adults (59, 64.5; 75). We first studied the properties of spontaneous IPSCs (sIPSCs). The sIPSC decay time constant decreased significantly with age (F=51.9, p