Intrinsic excitability of rat hippocampal granule cells increases along the dorsal-to-ventral axis

The dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus exhibits striking anatomical and functional heterogeneity along its dorsoventral axis, yet the intrinsic electrophysiological diversity of its principal excitatory neurons, the granule cells, across the dorsoventral axis remains unexplored. Here, we systematically examined the electrophysiological properties of DG granule cells across the dorsal, intermediate, and ventral regions of the rat hippocampus. We found a progressive increase in input resistance, impedance amplitude, and firing rate of granule cells, accompanied by a gradual slowdown in repolarization kinetics of their action potentials along the dorsal-to-ventral axis. Our analyses demonstrated that granule cells acted as class I integrators that lacked strong resonance properties across the dorsoventral axis. We performed pairwise correlation and dimensionality reduction analyses to reveal weak dependencies across physiological measurements and the absence of distinct clusters for dorsal, intermediate, or ventral granule cells. Importantly, blade-specific analyses of granule cell physiology revealed that all measurements manifested pronounced heterogeneities even within a given dorsoventral section and a specific blade. Strikingly, ventral granule cells in the infrapyramidal blade manifested higher firing rates compared to their counterparts in the suprapyramidal blade. These blade-specific differences were limited to the ventral granule cells, with negligible distinctions between granule cells in the two blades of either dorsal or intermediate hippocampus. Together, our findings unveil a progressive increase in excitability of DG granule cells along the dorsal-to-ventral axis and a blade-specific granularity of firing properties, adding new dimensions to the several known anatomical, molecular, and behavioral differences across the hippocampal dorsoventral axis.