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A ubiquitous spectrolaminar motif across independent studies, including in the Mackey et al. dataset

Major, A. J.; Abdaltawab, A.; Phillips, J. M.; Wang, T.; Lee, E. K.; Lichtenfeld, M. J.; Chandrasekaran, C.; Saalmann, Y. B.; Maier, A.; Desimone, R.; Miller, E. K.; Bastos, A. M.; Mendoza-Halliday, D.

2025-05-08 neuroscience
10.1101/2025.05.07.652644 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Our study (Mendoza-Halliday et al., 2024) made two contributions: (1) discovery of a ubiquitous cortical motif and (2) a tool derived from it--the Frequency-based Layer Identification Procedure (FLIP and vFLIP). Mackey et al. critique the tool, questioning its advantage over classic current source density (CSD) analysis, and reason backwards to challenge the motifs ubiquity. In our rebuttal, we confirm the spectrolaminar motif in diverse cortical areas using data from multiple research groups (who joined us in this rebuttal) as well as Mackey et al.s own dataset. Additionally, we introduce vFLIP2, an improved version of our tool that addresses their comments. It reliably identified and localized the motif in our data and Mackey et al.s data. Our findings reaffirm the motifs ubiquity. We value Mackey et al.s comments, which helped refine our tool.

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