NEURAL CORRELATES OF AUDITORY TRACE CONDITIONING IN THE RETROSPLENIAL CORTEX

In this study, we seek to identify and causally test retrosplenial cortex (RSC) layer 2/3 neuronal subpopulations that support appetitive auditory trace conditioning (AATC) using two-photon calcium imaging and holographic photostimulation. Head-fixed GCaMP6s mice were trained for 5 days to associate a conditioned sound (CS+) with liquid reward delivered after a 1-s silent trace interval. Successful learning was marked by anticipatory licking following CS+ presentation. We pre-processed the resulting 2-photon data with Suite2p (Pachitariu et al., 2017) and synchronised it with sound presentation and lick detection using our lab-developed synchronisation tool. In our preliminary analysis using Bayesian decoding(?), we identified the neuron populations that encode the sound-reward representations. Further, using GCaMP6s mice that are transfected with red-shifted ChRmine opsin (Kishi et al., 2022) and our custom pipeline, we will target the identified populations with two-photon holographic photostimulation to test their contributions.​