Data from paper "Selectively vulnerable deep cortical layer 5/6 fast-spiking interneurons in Alzheimer’s Disease models in vivo", Papanikolaou et al., Neuron 2025.

Source data for quantitative comparisons from paper "Selectively vulnerable deep cortical layer 5/6 fast-spiking interneurons in Alzheimer’s Disease models in vivo", Papanikolaou et al., Neuron 2025.MATLAB and R code to reproduce quantitative comparisons is available at GitHub (https://github.com/amaliapapa/deep-layer-AD) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15119098).Paper Summary:Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is initiated by amyloid-beta (Aβ) accumulation in neocortex; however, the cortical layers and neuronal cell types first susceptible to Aβ remain unknown. Using in vivo two-photon Ca2+-imaging in the visual cortex of AD mouse models, we found that cortical layer 5 neurons displayed abnormally prolonged Ca2+-transients before substantial plaque formation. Neuropixels recordings revealed that these abnormal transients were associated with reduced spiking and impaired visual tuning of parvalbumin (PV)-positive fast-spiking interneurons (FSIs) in layers 5/6, whereas PV-FSIs in superficial layers remained unaffected. These dysfunctions occurred alongside a deep layer-specific reduction in neuronal pentraxin 2 (NPTX2) within excitatory neurons, decreased GluA4 in PV-FSIs, and fewer excitatory synapses onto PV-FSIs. Notably, NPTX2 overexpression increased excitatory input onto layers 5/6 PV-FSIs and rectified their spiking activity. Thus, our findings reveal an early, selective impairment of deep cortical layers 5/6 in AD models and identify deep layer PV-FSIs as therapeutic targets.