Topic: differential assembly formation

A long-standing theory proposes memories are stored in the synaptic wiring of strongly connected neural populations, known as neural assemblies. However, experimental evidence for assembly formation has been limited to inferring changes in synaptic connectivity from changes in neural activity following behavioral learning. Using tagged c-fos activity combined with channelrhodopsin expression, we directly measured the synaptic strength between neurons in the Piriform cortex (PCx) following mice learning an odor discrimination task. Our results suggest that an assembly forms after learning, but