Topic: primary somatosensory cortex (S1)

The rodent's primary somatosensory cortex (S1) processes sensory information from the whiskers on the snout. During active sensation, cortical pyramidal neurons integrate feedforward and a variety of feedback inputs to form a percept. In S1, feedback input from the higher-order (HO) posteromedial thalamic complex (POm) was shown to facilitate NMDAR-mediated nonlinear dendritic events in L2/3 neurons, which enhance synaptic plasticity and promote spiking. Such events greatly depend on the spatial and temporal arrangement of synaptic activity. However, the spatiotemporal relationship between HO

Neonatal hypoxic ischemia (HI) causes motor impairment affecting daily activity. Rehabilitation is frequently implemented to improve motor performance, but its effects are often insufficient for acquiring fine motor coordination. Recently, myelin plasticity has been pointed out necessary for improving motor skills. However, the significance of myelination for motor improvement after HI remains unclear.To address this issue, we investigated the effect of rehabilitation exercise on myelination in a neonatal HI rat model. We then examined the effectiveness of pharmacological promotion of myelinat

Whisking, the process through which rodents move their whiskers to explore the physical space around them, is a stereotyped behaviour occurring in strict coordination with nose and head movements. Whisking frequency can be phased-locked to respiration rate and olfactory inputs have been recently shown to modulate whisker-dependent responses of a subset of neurons in the barrel cortex. However, the impact of olfactory signals on whisker-dependent behaviours remains poorly understood. Here, we hypothesized that olfactory inputs influence the animal’s behaviour in a Go/No-Go texture discriminatio