lateral inhibition: one construct, many systems

In sensory neuroscience, lateral inhibition is the arrangement by which an active sensory neuron suppresses the responses of its neighbours, so that differences (edges and contrasts) are exaggerated while uniform regions are damped. Hartline, Wagner, and Ratliff's 1956 Inhibition in the eye of Limulus demonstrated it directly in the horseshoe-crab eye, where illuminating one ommatidium reduced the firing of its neighbours, explaining contrast effects such as Mach bands. The referent is a local competitive interaction among neurons that sharpens contrast, and it is the same construct that developmental biology uses to make neighbouring cells adopt different fates.[1]

Unit

How strongly an active unit suppresses its neighbours

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured by the drop in a unit's response when its neighbours are activated

In developmental biology, lateral inhibition is how a cell beginning to adopt a particular fate signals its immediate neighbours not to do the same, so that a salt-and-pepper pattern of distinct cell types emerges from an initially uniform sheet. Collier, Monk, Maini, and Lewis's 1996 Pattern formation by lateral inhibition with feedback modelled the Delta–Notch signalling that implements it, in which rising Notch activity in one cell drives down its neighbours' ability to signal. It is the same construct as sensory lateral inhibition (an active unit suppressing like activity in its neighbours), here producing spatial pattern in a tissue rather than contrast in a sensory map.[2]

Unit

How strongly a committing cell suppresses the same fate in its neighbours

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred from the spacing of differentiated cells and from Notch-pathway perturbations