ePoster

Exercise accelerates place cell representational drift

Mitchell de Snoo, Adam MP Miller, Adam I Ramsaran, Sheena A Josselyn, Paul W Frankland
FENS Forum 2024(2024)
Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna, Austria

Conference

FENS Forum 2024

Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna, Austria

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Mitchell de Snoo, Adam MP Miller, Adam I Ramsaran, Sheena A Josselyn, Paul W Frankland

Abstract

Stable neural ensembles are often thought to underlie stable learned behaviors and memory. Recent longitudinal experiments, however, that tracked the activity of the same neurons over days to weeks have shown that neuronal activity patterns can change over extended timescales even if behaviors remain the same – a phenomenon termed representational drift. Here we test whether neural circuit remodeling (defined as any change in structural connectivity) contributes to representational drift. To do this, we tracked how hippocampal CA1 spatial representations of a familiar environment change with time in conventionally housed mice relative to mice housed with a running wheel. Voluntary exercise is an environmental stimulus that promotes hippocampal circuit remodeling, primarily via promoting adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus. Adult neurogenesis alters structural connectivity patterns since the integration of adult-generated granule cells (abGCs) is a competitive process where new input/output synaptic connections may co-exist and/or even replace existing synaptic connections. Comparing the spatial activity of downstream hippocampal CA1 place cells in the same familiar environment over 2 weeks, we found that the activity of place cells in exercise mice exhibited accelerated representational drift compared to control mice, suggesting that hippocampal circuit remodeling may indeed drive representational drift.

Unique ID: fens-24/exercise-accelerates-place-cell-representational-d27e40ff