MULTI-NEUROPIXELS RECORDINGS ACROSS BASAL GANGLIA NUCLEI DURING HEAD-FIXED REACHING

The cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus (CBT) network plays a central role in controlling movement and is especially relevant in movement disorders, where deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is able to alleviate motor symptoms. While recent studies report widespread encoding of motor signals across the brain, high density recordings from the STN remain sparse, and its population-level encoding of motor parameters is not well understood. The aim of this project is to investigate motor encoding at the population level in the CBT network with a specific focus on the STN. To this end, we performed large-scale electrophysiological recordings using simultaneous multiple-neuropixels probes in head-fixed mice during a goal-directed reaching task to measure the population activity and inter-region communication across the CBT network. We found region-specific differences in kinematic encoding at the population level. This work establishes a baseline for future studies in Parkinsonian mouse models and offers a framework to investigate the circuit mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effects of STN deep brain stimulation.