Oxytocin decreases cycle amplitude of FL without changing periodicity.

<p>A, a stable FL is induced by the application of 5 μM NMDA and 10 μM 5HT. A sample of traces, corresponding to the gray bar in the bottom-left, shows, on a faster time base, the characteristic double alternation among L2 and L5 homosegmental and homolateral VRs (B). Addition of oxytocin (100 nM; see gray bar in A, top) depolarizes all VRs. As depicted in the insert corresponding to the gray bar in the bottom-right of A, in the presence of oxytocin oscillations maintain their typical double alternation, although with smaller amplitude. The scatter plot in D reports the single values of cycle amplitude for different experiments (gray dots and lines), pointing out the significant reduction in average amplitude of oscillations (open bars) after the addition of oxytocin (0.22±0.15 and 0.18±0.13 mV, respectively; *; paired t-test; P = 0,001; n = 13). Histograms in E depict the reduction in amplitude of FL oscillations in correspondence to cumulative increase in oxytocin concentrations (100 nM and 1 μM) that are equally able to reduce cycle amplitude with respect to control (*, one way repeated measures ANOVA followed by all pairwise multiple comparison procedures with Tukey test, P = 0.004, n = 5).