The authors built dSC1, a large-scale, synapse-resolved electron microscopy dataset of the mouse spinal dorsal horn, and SPINE, a deep-learning pipeline that identifies major sensory neuron subtypes directly from EM images; applying SPINE to dSC1 revealed that low-threshold mechanoreceptors form substantially more synapses and receive far more GABAergic presynaptic inhibition than high-threshold mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors and nociceptors, and identified five populations of spinal inhibitory neurons (IhNs) each preferentially driven by and presynaptically inhibiting a single sensory subtype, with most also feedforwardly inhibiting other sensory pathways, together suggesting a dual-mode logic of sensory-evoked inhibition.
The authors built dSC1, a large-scale, synapse-resolved electron microscopy dataset of the mouse spinal dorsal horn, and SPINE, a deep-learning pipeline that identifies major sensory neuron subtypes directly from EM images; applying SPINE to dSC1 revealed that low-threshold mechanoreceptors form substantially more synapses and receive far more GABAergic presynaptic inhibition than high-threshold mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors and nociceptors, and identified five populations of spinal inhibitory neurons (IhNs) each preferentially driven by and presynaptically inhibiting a single sensory subtype, with most also feedforwardly inhibiting other sensory pathways, together suggesting a dual-mode logic of sensory-evoked inhibition.