Topic: CA2 pyramidal neurons

Social memory, one's ability to recognize and remember experiences with other conspecifics, consists of several discrete psychological processes. These include the ability to rapidly detect whether an individual is novel or familiar (“I know that person, but from where?”) and the recollection of an individual’s specific identity and the associated set of past experiences (“ah, we met at COSYNE last year”). These processes have conflicting demands and requirements. Familiarity is an abstract concept that can readily generalize to any individual in any context. In contrast, social episodes consi

Disturbances in the neuronal activity of the hippocampal CA2 subregion have been shown to result in impaired social memory in rodents. However, the current assessment of behavioural role of CA2 within the circuit of cognition relies on classical tests, presenting only a snapshot of the behaviour of subjects. As both clinical and preclinical data have revealed a relevance for CA2 in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, it is crucial to uncover the effects of CA2 E/I imbalance in more natural social environments over longer periods of time. Furthermore, gaining a deeper understanding of

The extracellular matrix glycoprotein reelin is best known for orchestrating migration and positioning of cortical neurons during embryonic development. The reeler mutant mouse, lacking reelin expression, displays severe migration defects and aberrant dendritic development of cortical neurons. Less is known about the consequences of postnatally induced reelin deficiency in conditional reelin knockout (reln cko) mice. Postnatally induced reln cko was shown to entail functional deficits of neuronal communication, while morphological deficits of neurons have not been reported so far. Here, we inv