Neural Circuits and Systems Neuroscience
Author: Lucca Salomon | email: luccasalomon@gmail.com
Lucca Salomon 1°, Noel Federman 1°, Sebastián Alejo Romano 1°, Antonia Marin-Burgin 1°
1° Biomedicine Research Institute of Buenos Aires (IBioBA) – CONICET – Partner Institute of the Max Planck Society
Increasing evidence indicates that representation of sensory stimuli in cortical areas is plastic and can be modified by experience. In particular, a unique feature of olfactory processing is its high dependence on past experience, context, and the animals internal state. To study contextual modulation of sensory learning we developed a GO/NO GO associative learning task in a virtual reality environment: animals learn to associate an odor with a water reward when presented in a particular visual context. Mice learn the task in around 6 days showing anticipatory licking responses only in the rewarded odor-context association. In addition, other behavioral variables, like inhalation rate and speed, are adapted through learning. To test the importance of the piriform cortex (PC) in the learned association we used three different methods to bilaterally silence PC in expert animals: i) application of GABA agonist muscimol; ii) a chemogenetic approach to express hM4Di to silence excitatory neurons with the artificial ligand CNO iii) optogenetic activation of inhibitory PV neurons in PC (still setting up). Preliminary results with muscimol and chemogenetics show that animals with silenced PC have a decrease in performance suggesting a critical role of the PC in the behavior. Interestingly, silencing PC not only affected the ability to distinguish odors, but also the visual contexts, suggesting that the PC participates in the association between odors-contexts-reward.