Topic: longitudinal two-photon calcium imaging

Persistent neural activity underlies key cognitive functions like short-term memory. To support persistent neural activity, circuits must learn to balance recurrent amplification (prolonging network time constants) with sufficient robustness to gate out perturbations in local parts of the network. It remains unclear how such persistent and robust representations emerge in neural circuits. Neurons in the mouse anterior lateral motor cortex (ALM) exhibit preparatory activity during motor planning, a robust persistent activity maintained by both hemispheres. We used longitudinal two-photon calciu

Sounds are represented in the mouse auditory cortex in the form of a representational map, in which the similarity of global activity patterns elicited by a pair of sounds encodes their perceptual relationship. Interestingly, sensory processing in cortex is generally robust despite loss of neurons during aging, and even the accelerated loss during prodromal phases of neurodegeneration. Here, we probed the robustness of the representational map against the permanent removal of specific neurons and tested in how far its structure is stabilized by homeostatic network mechanisms. We combined longi