Project
Formation and consolidation of social memories in the ventral hippocampus
Animals exhibit a range of social interactions (dominance hierarchies, mating and parental behaviors) that rely on their ability to recognize conspecifics. It has been shown that the hippocampus is involved in the higher order representation of social signals in humans and monkeys. In rodents, however, the dorsal hippocampus was only weakly modulated by the presence of other rats. One hypothesis is that this lack of modulation in the dorsal hippocampus is related to the functional segregation of the hippocampus. Specifically, the anterior hippocampus of primates corresponding to the ventral hippocampus of rodents represents social information, and the dorsal hippocampus of rodents is mailnly concerned with spatial information. Our preliminary data suggest that social signals are represented in the rat ventral hippocampus. We will examine the formation and consolidation of social memories in the ventral hippocampus. The research plan is divided into four work packages: (WP1) refining our picture of socially evoked responses in the ventral hippocampus, (WP2) replay of socially evoked responses/social events in the ventral hipppocampus during sleep, (WP3) formation, artifical induction and consolidation of “rat-grandmother-cells”, (WP4) optogenetic manipulation of social memory consolidation during sleep. We will use a combination of low- and high-speed videography, ultrasound recordings, tetrode recording, in vivo whole-cell recordings and nanostimulation in socially interacting and sleeping animals. This work plans moves progressively from a description of the modulation of ventral hippocampus activity by social stimuli to an investigation of whether social information is replayed in the ventral hippocampus during sleep and finally to testing models of social memory formation and consolidation.
Team
Publications
Neural representations of kinship
Ann M. Clemens & Michael Brecht
Curr Opin Neurobiol 68:116-123 (2021)
Microcircuits for spatial coding in the medial entorhinal cortex
John J Tukker, Prateep Beed, Michael Brecht, Richard Kempter, Edvard I Moser, and Dietmar Schmitz
Physiol Rev. 102:653–688 (2022)
Perirhinal input to neocortical layer 1 controls learning
Guy Doron, Jiyun N Shin, Naoya Takahashi, Moritz Drüke, Christina Bocklisch, Salina Skenderi, Lisa de Mont, Maria Toumazou, Julia Ledderose, Michael Brecht, Richard Naud and Matthew E Larkum
Science. 370(6523):eaaz3136
The lateral septum mediates kinship behavior in the rat
Ann M Clemens, Hong Wang and Michael Brecht
Nat Commun. 11(1):3161 (2020)
Effects of sexual experience and puberty on mouse genital cortex revealed by chronic imaging
Johanna Sigl-Glöckner, Eduard Maier, Naoya Takahashi, Robert Sachdev, Matthew Larkum, Michael Brecht
Curr Biol. 29(21):3588-3599.e4 (2019)
Neuronal responses to conspecifics in the ventral CA1
Rajnish P Rao, Moritz von Heimendahl, Viktor Bahr, Michael Brecht
Cell Rep. 27(12):3460-3472.e3 (2019)