Presentation Details
| Temporal Dynamics of Decision-Predicting Time Cells in Olfactory Discrimination: Molecular and Neural Mechanisms of Associative Learning Kira Steinke1, Emily Gibson1, Diego Restrepo2. 1University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA.2Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA |
Abstract
In nature animals, such as rodents, routinely demonstrate the ability to collect, process, and integrate sensory information about the world to survive by being proficient in finding food, avoiding threats, and selecting mates. Importantly, the effectiveness of these behaviors is rooted in the interplay between olfaction and experience influenced by available contextual information. Thus, simply detecting an odor is insufficient; an animal must apply meaning to it and respond appropriately. Previous research has consistently highlighted the hippocampus, particularly the dorsal CA1 (dCA1), as a key player in learning and memory. Our previous work has shown that during olfactory discrimination learning, dCA1 pyramidal cells develop specific responses to odors as animals become more adept at go/no-go tasks. Our recent findings reveal that groups of pyramidal neurons exhibit divergent responses to stimuli at specific time points, a phenomenon we term ‘time tiling’. This can be conceptualized as a temporally distinct divergence in neural activity related to stimulus valence during the associative learning process of the go/no-go task, and thus we named these cells ‘Decision Predicting Time Cells’ or DPTCs. The work presented here utilizes two-photon microscopy and halorhodopsin inhibition to investigate the behavioral relevance of these cells, particularly their expression of Calbindin2, and the effects of inhibition on these populations during the go/no-go task. Ultimately, these studies will help to elucidate the roles of Calbindin2 expressing cells during olfactory discrimination task, as well as further the field's knowledge on molecular aspects and expression patterns of DPTCs, helping to uncover crucial details about how memories are formed and retrieved in the brain.
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