Publicação
Cingulate – hippocampal interactions during memory-guided behaviour
| Resumo: | Spatial working memory (SWM) – the ability to store and process spatial information during a short period of time – is essential to successfully perform memory-guided choices. While dorsal hippocampus (dHIPP) has long been proven to be necessary for the formation of spatial memories, few studies have recently shown activity synchronization between this brain region and anterior Cingulate Cortex (CG) as rodents approach choice points in a spatial decision-making task. Moreover, this coherence may be related with transfer of spatial information to successfully achieve the optimal response. However, more studies focusing on dHIPP and CG are needed to determine their relevance for memory-guided behaviours. In this master project, I aimed to manipulate dHIPP and CG neural activity while rats are performing a SWM dependent task named delayed nonmatching-to-position (DNMP) task. Here, we developed experimental protocols to 1) perturb dHIPP and CG neural activity using DREADDs, design muscarinic receptor exclusively activated by CNO, and 2) disrupted CG neural activity in specific moments of the task using optogenetics. Preliminary results from the DREADDs experiments show that inactivating dHIPP and CG result in modifications of rodent running speed at specific epochs of the task. In the optogenetic experiment, we successfully implemented an experimental environment that provides intra-cerebral light stimulation conditioned to each DNMP phase. Using this technique, a performance decrease in experimental animals was observed when stimulation occurred during choice phase, which might reveal the necessity of dHIPP-CG interaction to perform memory-guided choices. This work provides tools to, in the future, use experimental designs in which cingulate-hippocampal communication is perturbed using precision optogenetic manipulation and evaluate behavioural modifications. |
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| Autores principais: | Pereira, Ana Raquel Rosa |
| Assunto: | Hipocampo dorsal Córtex cingulado anterior DREADDs Optogenética Teses de mestrado - 2019 |
| Ano: | 2020 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | Spatial working memory (SWM) – the ability to store and process spatial information during a short period of time – is essential to successfully perform memory-guided choices. While dorsal hippocampus (dHIPP) has long been proven to be necessary for the formation of spatial memories, few studies have recently shown activity synchronization between this brain region and anterior Cingulate Cortex (CG) as rodents approach choice points in a spatial decision-making task. Moreover, this coherence may be related with transfer of spatial information to successfully achieve the optimal response. However, more studies focusing on dHIPP and CG are needed to determine their relevance for memory-guided behaviours. In this master project, I aimed to manipulate dHIPP and CG neural activity while rats are performing a SWM dependent task named delayed nonmatching-to-position (DNMP) task. Here, we developed experimental protocols to 1) perturb dHIPP and CG neural activity using DREADDs, design muscarinic receptor exclusively activated by CNO, and 2) disrupted CG neural activity in specific moments of the task using optogenetics. Preliminary results from the DREADDs experiments show that inactivating dHIPP and CG result in modifications of rodent running speed at specific epochs of the task. In the optogenetic experiment, we successfully implemented an experimental environment that provides intra-cerebral light stimulation conditioned to each DNMP phase. Using this technique, a performance decrease in experimental animals was observed when stimulation occurred during choice phase, which might reveal the necessity of dHIPP-CG interaction to perform memory-guided choices. This work provides tools to, in the future, use experimental designs in which cingulate-hippocampal communication is perturbed using precision optogenetic manipulation and evaluate behavioural modifications. |
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