Topic: GCaMP6s

Understanding how cortical circuits generate complex behavior requires investigating the cell types that comprise them. Here, much effort has been focused on inhibitory neuron types but the functional roles of distinct classes of excitatory pyramidal neurons (PyNs) are less well un-derstood. We, therefore, used widefield imaging to measure the cortex-wide activity of distinct PyN types and investigated their functional role in mice that performed an auditory decision-making task. We used two mouse lines, expressing the calcium indicator GCaMP6s in two major PyN types: FezF2 for pyramidal-tract

Sensory experience and perceptual learning changes receptive field properties of cortical pyramidal neurons possibly mediated by long-term potentiation (LTP) of synapses. We have previously shown in the mouse somatosensory cortex (S1) that sensory-driven LTP in layer (L) 2/3 pyramidal neurons is dependent on higher order thalamic feedback from the posteromedial nucleus (POm), which is thought to convey contextual information from various cortical regions integrated with sensory input. We have followed up on this work by dissecting the cortical microcircuitry that underlies this form of LTP

Standard models of episodic memory emphasise that parallel streams of spatial information, arriving from medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), and object information, arriving from lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), are integrated within the hippocampus. However, we recently discovered that fan cells in the LEC send direct projections to MEC, suggesting that spatial and object information could be integrated within MEC (Vandrey et al. 2022, doi:10.7554/eLife.83008). Evidence for object-related firing in the MEC is consistent with this possibility, but whether LEC projections influence spatial and obje