Prenatal stress is associated with altered behavioral, cognitive, and psychiatric outcomes in offspring. Due to the importance of GABAergic systems in normal development and in psychiatric disorders, prenatal stress effects on these neurons have been investigated in animal models. Prenatal stress delays GABAergic progenitor migration, but the significance of these early developmental disruption...

GABAergic interneurons are essential for a functional equilibrium between excitatory and inhibitory impulses throughout the CNS. Disruption of this equilibrium can lead to various neurological or neuropsychiatric disorders such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. Schizophrenia itself is clinically defined by negative (e.g., depression) and positive (e.g., hallucinations) symptoms as well as cognitive...

BACKGROUND GABAergic synaptic transmission is known to play a critical role in the assembly of neuronal circuits during development and is responsible for maintaining the balance between excitatory and inhibitory signaling in the brain during maturation into adulthood. Importantly, defects in GABAergic neuronal function and signaling have been linked to a number of neurological diseases, includ...

New olfactory bulb granule cells (GCs) are GABAergic interneurons continuously arising from neuronal progenitors and integrating into preexisting bulbar circuits. They receive both GABAergic and glutamatergic synaptic inputs from olfactory bulb intrinsic neurons and centrifugal afferents. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal dynamic of newborn GC synaptogenesis in adult mouse olfactory bulb...

GABAergic signaling in hippocampal pyramidal neurons undergoes a switch from depolarizing to hyperpolarizing during early neuronal development. Whether such a transformation of GABAergic action occurs in dentate granule cells (DGCs), located at the first stage of the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit, is unclear. Here, we use noninvasive extracellular recording to monitor the effect of synaptical...

Tonic GABAergic inhibition regulates neuronal excitability and has been implicated to be involved in both neurological and psychiatric diseases. We have previously shown that the endogenous peptide antisecretory factor (AF) decreases phasic GABAergic inhibition onto pyramidal CA1 neurons. In the present study, using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings, we investigated the mechanisms behind this d...

Basal forebrain GABAergic and cholinergic circuits regulate the activity of cholinergic projections to the cortex and hippocampus. Because these projections influence cortical development and function, the development of basal forebrain excitatory and inhibitory neurons is critical for overall brain development. We show that the neurotransmitter phenotype of these neurons is developmentally reg...

GABAergic projections from the neocortex to subcortical structures have been poorly characterized. Using Dlxi12b-Cre mice, we found anatomical evidence for GABAergic neurons that project from the mouse medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to multiple subcortical targets. We used a combination of patch-clamp electrophysiology, optogenetics, and pharmacology to confirm that Dlxi12b-labeled projections...

Hippocampal network activity is predominantly coordinated by γ-amino-butyric acid (GABA)ergic neurons. We have previously hypothesized that the altered excitability of hippocampal neurons in Alzheimer's disease (AD), which manifests as increased in vivo susceptibility to seizures in the TgCRND8 mouse model of AD, may be related to disruption of hippocampal GABAergic neurons. In agreement, our p...

Inhibitory circuits in the brain rely on GABA-releasing interneurons. For long, inhibitory circuits were considered weakly plastic in the face of patterns of neuronal activity that trigger long-term changes in the synapses between excitatory principal cells. Recent studies however have shown that GABAergic circuits undergo various forms of long-term plasticity. For the purpose of this review, w...