Fig. 7: Targeted microablation of inhibitory neurons causes a longer-lasting disturbance of the representational map.

a, Representative example of microablation of a targeted inhibitory neuron with PT and CS tuning. Left: interneuron targeted for microablation (white arrow) showing expression of GCaMP6m (green), H2BB::mCherry (red) and mDlx-driven tagBFP (blue); scale bar, 20 μm. Middle: calcium responses to various pure tones before and after microablation. Right: calcium responses to various complex sounds before and after microablation. b, Target neurons for inhibitory neuron microablation. Top: sorted sound-evoked amplitudes before microablation in an FOV. Interneurons are labeled as blue bars, and excitatory neurons are labeled as gray bars. Middle: sorted amplitudes of the same population above but only from interneurons. Four to eight highly responsive interneurons were targeted per FOV. Bottom: experimentally targeted neurons and neurons corresponding to target groups in responsive and nonresponsive cohorts were excluded from analysis. Analysis was conducted on the remaining spared neurons (gray bars) c, Similarity matrix of population vectors for all stimuli averaged across all FOVs for each day in the inhibitory neuron ablation cohort (n = 42 FOVs). d, Baseline-normalized correlations averaged across diagonal elements (dark pink) and nondiagonal elements (light pink) in the similarity matrices in c (data are shown as mean ± s.e.m. across six mice). Data were analyzed by two-sided t-test of normalized average correlation between baseline days and days after ablation with an FDR correction (*P < 0.05 and **P < 0.001) and by one-way ANOVA of normalized average correlation across days in diagonal elements (P = 3.3 × 10⁻³) and nondiagonal elements (P = 0.068; see Supplementary Table 1). Yellow vertical lines indicate the time point of ablation procedure. For comparison, the analogous effect of sound-responsive ablation of all neurons (mostly excitatory) is depicted in Fig. 2.

Source data