Topic: optogenetic and chemogenetic techniques

Episodic memories are encoded by sparse populations of neurons activated during an experience. These neural ensembles constitute memory engrams that are both necessary and sufficient for inducing recall even long after memory acquisition. This suggests that following encoding, engrams are stabilized to support reliable memory retrieval. However, little is known about the temporal evolution of engrams over the course of memory consolidation or how it impacts mnemonic properties. Here we employed computational and experimental approaches to examine how the composition and selectivity of engrams