Interneuron diversity

 During the course of the last ~25 years, there was an explosion of studies on the neurochemical, morphological, physiological and pharmacological properties of interneurons, which gave rise to the identity of a multitude of anatomically and functionally distinct GABAergic interneuron types. These studies revealed that the cell body, axon-initial segment and dendritic domains of pyramidal cells and interneurons are targeted by distinct interneuron types (Markram et al., 2004; Bartos et al., 2014), indicating that compartment-specific computational operations on the level of individual cells are controlled by specialized inhibitory cells. Interneuron diversity was largely investigated in the hippocampal CA1-3 and neocortical areas. We focus our work on the dentate gyrus, the input gate of the hippocampus using intracellular labelling of cells in slice preparations with subsequent antibody labelling, confocal and electron microscopy. Moreover, by using transgenic mice with viral expression we labell local and long-range projecting interneuron types.