Testing the Efficacy of Single-Cell Stimulation in Biasing Presubicular Head Direction Activity

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
Stefano ColettaAndrea Burgalossi

Abstract

To support navigation, the firing of head direction (HD) neurons must be tightly anchored to the external space. Indeed, inputs from external landmarks can rapidly reset the preferred direction of HD cells. Landmark stimuli have often been simulated as excitatory inputs from "visual cells" (encoding landmark information) to the HD attractor network; when excitatory visual inputs are sufficiently strong, preferred directions switch abruptly to the landmark location. In the present work, we tested whether mimicking such inputs via juxtacellular stimulation would be sufficient for shifting the tuning of individual presubicular HD cells recorded in passively rotated male rats. We recorded 81 HD cells in a cue-rich environment, and evoked spikes trains outside of their preferred direction (distance range, 11-178°). We found that HD tuning was remarkably resistant to activity manipulations. Even strong stimulations, which induced seconds-long spike trains, failed to induce a detectable shift in directional tuning. HD tuning curves before and after stimulation remained highly correlated, indicating that postsynaptic activation alone is insufficient for modifying HD output. Our data are thus consistent with the predicted stability of a...Continue Reading

Citations

May 3, 2018·Journal of Neurophysiology·Stefano ColettaAndrea Burgalossi
Jun 28, 2020·Nature Communications·Matthias NauChristian F Doeller

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