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Authors & Affiliations
Florian Steenbergen, Brice De La Crompe, Julian Ammer, Ilka Diester
Abstract
The prefrontal cortex plays a key role in the representation of cognitive parameters, including task-relevant sensory cues, action selection and context. However, the contribution of GABAergic inhibitory interneuron types to the representation of these task features in active cell assemblies and their formation is incompletely understood. Here we focus specifically on parvalbumin (PVIs) and somatostatin (SOMIs) expressing interneurons within the prelimbic cortex (PL) of mice, as these interneuron types have been described to be involved in context encoding.We designed a contextual-auditory stimulus task to disentangle the role of context and/or cue in neuronal representation. The task chamber comprises a linear tract divided into two areas (task initiation and task area). To access the task area, the mice have to open a gate by nosepoking. Behind the gate, one of two task chambers is presented in which the mice must react according to auditory and/or contextual cues. After each trial, the gate is closed and a new task chamber and auditory cue is selected randomly.To investigate the influence of PVIs and SOMIs on cortical computations, we collected calcium imaging data from task performing mice using the UCLA miniscope V4. Across the training stages, we recorded neuronal activities of SOMIs expressing GCaMP7f and GCaMP8m, as well as PVIs expressing GCaMP8m and excitatory cells expressing GCaMP7f. By contrasting the context sensitivity of excitatory cells in the PL with the neural coding of PV and SOM cells we contribute to understanding how interneurons shape the neuronal code within the mPFC.