From Figure 1, Li et al.
I wanted the title of this post to be “A tale of two one two three papers” but I couldn’t figure out how to get strikethroughs in the title field. And I thought “A tale of two, make that one, no make that two again, oops now three” might be a bit cumbersome. As promised, here’s another installment of the discussion of what happens when we receive conceptually related/overlapping papers. It starts with a paper that appeared just yesterday in Neuron by Kenichi Ohki and colleagues describing how mouse visual cortex neurons that developed from the same neural progenitor cell tend to be more similar functionally than those that did not.
Why is this significant? First a little background. Cells in visual cortex are tuned to different aspects of visual stimuli, such as orientation or direction, and anatomically are organized quite specifically. Cells with similar preferences tend to cluster together and to be selectively connected with each other (though to differing degrees in different species), and this specificity may underlie some of the many computations required to turn photons of light hitting our eyes into comprehensible percepts. It’s been proposed that this clustering could start in early development; neurons born from the same neural progenitor migrate vertically to form columns of sibling neurons, and could be the basis for clusters of adult cells with similar properties. That link hasn’t been demonstrated experimentally until now, and Ohtsuki et al. provides some evidence in support of it.
Now, visual cortex aficionados among you may think this sounds a bit similar to Li et al., a paper by Yang Dan and colleagues that appeared a few months ago, and indeed it is. And you may also recall that THAT paper appeared alongside Yu et al. from Songhai Shi’s lab about the development of synapses between sibling neurons.
So here’s the story from the beginning (or rather, the beginning of our involvement with the manuscripts).