Dopaminergic regulation of dendritic calcium: fast multisite calcium imaging

Optimal dopamine tone is required for the normal cortical function; however it is still unclear how cortical-dopamine-release affects information processing in individual cortical neurons. Thousands of glutamatergic inputs impinge onto elaborate dendritic trees of neocortical pyramidal neurons. In the process of ensuing synaptic integration (information processing), a variety of calcium transients are generated in remote dendritic compartments. In order to understand the cellular mechanisms of dopaminergic modulation it is important to know whether and how dopaminergic signals affect dendritic calcium transients. In this chapter, we describe a relatively inexpensive method for monitoring dendritic calcium fluctuations at multiple loci across the pyramidal dendritic tree, at the same moment of time (simultaneously). The experiments have been designed to measure the amplitude, time course and spatial extent of action potential-associated dendritic calcium transients before and after application of dopaminergic drugs. In the examples provided here the dendritic calcium transients were evoked by triggering the somatic action potentials (backpropagation-evoked), and puffs of exogenous dopamine were applied locally onto selected dendritic branches.