CHARACTERIZING NEURONAL SENSORY RESPONSES IN THE MOTOR CORTEX EVOKED BY DYNAMIC TACTILE STIMULATIONS

In a rich and complex environment, as an individual interacts with its surrounding, it constantly adapts its motor commands according to the perception of tactile sensory inputs.
Within the central nervous system, there is a close communication between the primary somatosensory (S1) and motor (M1) cortices, which is likely the key for such somatosensori-motor transformations. However how M1 integrates distributed tactile inputs to constantly adapt ongoing motor programs still remains to be understood.
In our work we use the mouse whisker system as a model to study how M1, known for its role in the initiation and fine tuning of motor programs, processes tactile inputs.
Indeed, it has been demonstrated, through mesoscopic voltage sensitive dye imaging (Ferezou et al. 2007) that M1 shows waves of activity in response to a single whisker deflection, which originates from direct cortico-cortical topographic projections from S1.
Here we aim to further study how M1 responds to simple mono-whisker versus dynamic multiwhisker stimuli in layer 2/3 at the single cell and population levels by means of 2-photon calcium imaging in anesthetized mice. More specifically, we compare neuronal responses to single whisker deflections with those evoked during a dynamic multi-whisker stimulations applied with a glass capillary crossing the whisker array in the rostro-caudal direction. Two different angles are used to generate different whisker deflection sequences.