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Authors & Affiliations
Emiliano Jimenez Marquez, Bjørn Bredesen-Aa, Bram Serneels, Javid Rezai, Emre Yaksi
Abstract
Especially in juvenile and adult stage, zebrafish can perform cognitively demanding adaptive behaviors, that can be modulated by the animal’s prior experience to sensory cues. Such adaptive behaviors are shown to be mediated by distinct zebrafish forebrain nuclei that are homologues to mammalian cortico-limbic circuits. Our lab has previously shown structured resting state activity in the zebrafish forebrain, where ensembles of spatially organized neurons exhibit correlated activity. In the mammalian cortex, distinct classes of GABAergic neurons were show to play diverse roles in organizing such neural ensembles leading to modifications in sensorial representations. Here we set out to understand to what extent distinct classes of GABAergic neurons are present in zebrafish forebrain, how they contribute to organize neural ensembles and modulate sensory representations.To answer this question, we first identify distinct molecular classes of GABAergic neurons across the zebrafish forebrain using spatial transcriptomic technology. We showed that, most markers of mammalian GABAergic interneurons are present in topographically organized nuclei across the zebrafish forebrain. While many of these GABAergic neuron classes are primarily present in the subpalium, few of them are also present across pallial regions. We next investigated whether these GABAergic nuclei exhibit distinct spatio-temporally organized neural activity at rest and during sensory stimulation. We found that several of GABAergic nuclei can be identified based on their correlated activity. We are currently investigating how these different GABAergic nuclei interact with the rest of forebrain circuits and how these interactions change with sensory experience.