期刊
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
卷 40, 期 2, 页码 395-410出版社
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1496-19.2019
关键词
appetitive conditioning; food seeking; Fos; in vivo imaging; neuronal ensembles; medial prefrontal cortex
资金
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BB/M009017/1]
- MRC
- University of Sussex Strategic Development Funds, Sussex Neuroscience 4-year PhD programme
- Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health
- BBSRC [BB/M009017/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- MRC [MR/V036750/1, MR/S026495/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Animals selectively respond to environmental cues associated with food reward to optimize nutrient intake. Such appetitive conditioned stimulus- unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) associations are thought to be encoded in select, stable neuronal populations or neuronal ensembles, which undergo physiological modifications during appetitive conditioning. These ensembles in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) control well-established, cue-evoked food seeking, but the mechanisms involved in the genesis of these ensembles are unclear. Here, we used male Fos-GFP mice that express green fluorescent protein (GFP) in recently behaviorally activated neurons, to reveal how dorsal mPFC neurons are recruited and modified to encode CS-US memory representations using an appetitive conditioning task. In the initial conditioning session, animals did not exhibit discriminated, cue-selective food seeking, but did so in later sessions indicating that a CS-US association was established. Using microprism-based in vivo 2-Photon imaging, we revealed that only a minority of neurons activated during the initial session was consistently activated throughout subsequent conditioning sessions and during cue-evoked memory recall. Notably, using ex vivo electrophysiology, we found that neurons activated following the initial session exhibited transient hyperexcitability. Chemogenetically enhancing the excitability of these neurons throughout subsequent conditioning sessions interfered with the development of reliable cue-selective food seeking, indicated by persistent, nondiscriminated performance. We demonstrate how appetitive learning consistently activates a subset of neurons to form a stable neuronal ensemble during the formation of a CS-US association. This ensemble may arise from a pool of hyperexcitable neurons activated during the initial conditioning session.
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