Binocular vision requires proper developmental wiring of eye-specific inputs to the brain. In the thalamus, axons from the two eyes initially overlap in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus and undergo activity-dependent competition to segregate into target domains. Here, we combine eye-specific tract tracing with volumetric super-resolution imaging to measure the nanoscale molecular reorganization of developing retinogeniculate eye-specific synapses in the mouse brain. We show there are eye-specific differences in presynaptic vesicle pool size and vesicle association with the active zone at the earliest stages of retinogeniculate refinement but find no evidence of eye-specific differences in subsynaptic domain number, size, or transsynaptic alignment across development. Genetic disruption of spontaneous retinal activity decreases retinogeniculate synapse density, delays the emergence eye-specific differences in vesicle organization, and disrupts subsynaptic domain maturation. These results suggest that activity-dependent eye-specific presynaptic maturation underlies synaptic competition in the mammalian visual system.
Keywords: CP: Developmental biology; CP: Neuroscience; activity-dependent development; dLGN; eye-specific segregation; retinal waves; retinogeniculate; subsynaptic domain; super-resolution microscopy; synaptic competition; synaptic vesicle; synaptogenesis.
Published by Elsevier Inc.