Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IN VIVO MOSSY (Is the hippocampal mossy fiber synapse a detonator in vivo?)
Berichtszeitraum: 2016-04-01 bis 2018-03-31
The overall objective is to image the activity of CA3 pyramidal neurons in awake mice navigating along a linear track, and also to image activity in presynaptic mossy fiber terminals. Together this may conclusively confirm or rule out the detonation hypothesis. This approach allows to distinguish between detonator, conditional detonator, and subdetonator synapses, and more generally to quantify the number of simultaneously active mossy fiber boutons necessary to cause CA3 spiking during behavior. Such results would have substantial implications for established models of associative memory and spatial navigation, and more generally for information transfer in the hippocampus.
These efforts have produced dividends: we have succeeded in obtaining high-quality images from the CA3 region in awake, behaving mice, and are using this approach to quantify the population activity of CA3 pyramidal neurons during spatial navigation. These results have been accepted for presentation at a large conference.