Florina Szabó from the Molnár Lab and St John's College, Oxford has published her first paper from her DPhil work, 'Chronic silencing of subsets of cortical layer 5 pyramidal neurons has a long-term influence on the laminar distribution of parvalbumin interneurons and the perineuronal nets' in the Journal of Anatomy. Florina was supported by an Anatomical Society graduate studentship and a Goodger Scholarship and was co-supervised by Anna Hoerder-Suabedissen. Her work built on pilot data from Veronika Šigutová and Anna Schneider.
The study revealed that chronically silencing subsets of layer 5 projection neurons did not change the number and distribution of parvalbumin neurons in the developing brain. However, it did have a long-term impact on the laminar distribution of parvalbumin neurons and their perineuronal nets in the adult primary motor and somatosensory cortices.
Florina discovered that the absence of layer 5 activity only had a transient effect on the soma morphology of striatal PV neurons during the third week of postnatal development. Florina's study will help us better understand the bidirectional interaction between deep-layer pyramidal cells and GABAergic neurons, as well as the long-term impact of interrupting pyramidal neuron activity on inhibitory network formation.