Long-Range Temporal Correlations in the Spontaneous in vivo Activity of Interneuron in the Mouse Hippocampus

The spontaneous in vivo firings of neuron in mouse hippocampus are generally considered as neuronal noise, where there is no any correlation in the inter-spike interval (ISI) sequences. In the present study, we investigate the nature of the ISI sequences of neuron in CA1 area of mouse hippocampus. By using the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), we calculated the fluctuation or scaling exponent of the ISI sequences. The results indicated that there exists the long-range power-law correlation over large time scale in the ISI sequences. To further investigate the long-range correlation of ISI, we studied the long-range correlation of ISI sequences from different types of neurons in mouse hippocampus, which are four types of interneurons categorized by their firing patterns. Our results show the presence of long-range correlations in the ISI sequence of different types of neurons. Furthermore, the shuffle surrogate data achieved by randomly shuffle the original ISI sequence is used to verify our conclusion. The application of shuffle surrogate shows that the long-range correlation is destroyed by randomly shuffle, which demonstrates that there is actually the long-range correlation in the ISI sequence. Furthermore, we also compare the long-range correlations of ISI sequence when mice are in different behavioral states, slow-wave sleep (SWS) and active exploration (AE). Our results indicated that the ISI sequences exhibit different extent of long-range correlations: the long-range correlation is significantly stronger when mice are in AE than that of ISI sequence when mice are in SWS, which demonstrated that the varied long-range correlations exhibiting in ISIs of interneurons might be associated with activities of neuronal network regulating the ongoing neuronal activity of different interneurons.