Abstract
Parvalbumin neurons are a set of GABA-ergic inhibitory interneurons that arise from the medial ganglionic eminence and migrate towards various areas of the brain. Our project explores if parvalbumin neurons from class differences that can be detected by differential morphological and transcriptomic profiles when they migrate to these cortexes. The cortexes that were compared were the primary visual and primary motor cortex. The visual cortex suggested a bottom-up analysis and the motor cortex showed a top-down relationship. This project’s data was obtained from the Allen Institute of Brain Science (Seattle, WA) and analyzed using various python libraries for principal component analyses, heatmaps and regressions. The data had single cell morphological and transcriptomic data- they were from Scala et al. 2021 for the motor cortex and Gouwens et al. 2020 for the visual cortex. After analyzing this data, we were able to find that there were specific morphological differences in the motor and visual cortex- particularly in the size of the dendrites in the the motor cortex. We also found differential gene expression patterns in the motor and visual cortex visible by principal component analysis and heatmap. From this, we extrapolated clusters using both the morphologic and transcriptomic profiles and we noted some single gene variance in alongside morphologic variance. These results indicate that class differences may form between paravalbumin neurons located in individual circuits but further experimental analysis will need to confirm these differences.