Intracellular dynamics of hippocampal place cells during virtual navigation

By Christopher D. Harvey, Forrest Collman, D. Dombeck, David W. Tank. Nature, 2009

885 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Hippocampal place cells encode spatial information in rate and temporal codes. To examine the mechanisms underlying hippocampal coding, here we measured the intracellular dynamics of place cells by combining in vivo whole-cell recordings with a virtual-reality system. Head-restrained mice, running on a spherical treadmill, interacted with a computer-generated visual environment to perform spatial behaviours. Robust place-cell activity was present during movement along a virtual linear track. From whole-cell recordings, we identified three subthreshold signatures of place fields: an asymmetric ramp-like depolarization of the baseline membrane potential, an increase in the amplitude of intracellular theta oscillations, and a phase precession of the intracellular theta oscillation relative to the extracellularly recorded theta rhythm. These intracellular dynamics underlie the primary features of place-cell rate and temporal codes. The virtual-reality system developed here will enable new experimental approaches to study the neural circuits underlying navigation.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ad2b5646de2b0097abea8d42cbf8b4b2537abc5

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Environmental enrichment and neurogenesis: from mice to humans (2015, background): “Similar to real world environments, the hippocampus also activates during the exploration and navigation of virtual environments in humans and animals alike [61–63].”
Gamma frequency entrainment attenuates amyloid load and modifies microglia (2016, neutral): “1b, left) 13,30,33,34 .”
Removing brakes on adult brain plasticity: from molecular to behavioral interventions (2010, background): “The possibility of immersing rats into virtual environments should open the door to such studies (Harvey et al., 2009).”
Gamma-band synchronization in the neocortex: novel analysis methods and their application to sensory and motivational systems (2013, background): “When a rodent moves through a place field of a given place cell, then the cell’s phase of firing advances in a monotonic fashion relative to the hippocampal theta rhythm, a phenomenon called phase precession (O’Keefe & Recce, 1993; Harris et al., 2002; Mehta et al., 2002; Huxter et al., 2003; Harvey”
Neurophysiological and Computational Principles of Cortical Rhythms in Cognition (2010, neutral): “(422) tested these models by intracellular recording from hippocampal cells in mice performing virtual navigation.”
Modulation of visual responses by behavioral state in mouse visual cortex. (2010, positive): “In order to provide controlled visual stimuli while performing extracellular recording in an awake, moving animal, we adapted a recent technique to fix the head of the mouse while it stood or ran atop a freely floating foam ball (Dombeck et al., 2007; Harvey et al., 2009), which acts as a spherical ”
Widespread State-Dependent Shifts in Cerebellar Activity in Locomoting Mice (2012, methodology): “It should be noted that our apparatus can be used in conjunction with a virtual-reality system to investigate spatial navigation [79] and to achieve reliable classical eyeblink conditioning (A.”
Chronux: A Platform for Analyzing Neural Signals (2010, background): “…be a sequence of values, such as times of occurrence of spikes, or a sequence of counts in successive time-bins (Maier and Ghazanfar, 2007; Maier et al., 2008; Michels et al., 2008; Harvey et al., 2009; Lehmkuhle et al., 2009; Turner et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2009; van der Meer and Redish, 2009).”
Sequence Learning and the Role of the Hippocampus in Rodent Navigation (2012, neutral): “Moreover, the theta rhythm has also been recorded during alert behavior in different species [79–81], and place cells in mice demonstrate theta phase precession [82], thereby raising the possibility that theta sequences are present as well across species.”
Functional imaging of hippocampal place cells at cellular resolution during virtual navigation (2010, neutral): “…directly compared electrophysiologically-measured place cell properties and local field potentials (LFPs) in hippocampal window mice (cortical excavation and region infected with AAV2/1-synapsin-1 -GCaMP3) to the same measurements in control mice (no cortical excavation or virus infection) 15 .”
Dynamic Reorganization of Neuronal Activity Patterns in Parietal Cortex. (2017, methodology): “Virtual reality environments were constructed and operated using MATLAB-based ViRMEn software (Virtual Reality Mouse Engine) (Aronov and Tank, 2014; Harvey et al., 2009).”
A dedicated population for reward coding in the hippocampus (2018, positive): “This comparison confirmed that switching between tracks A and B elicited global remapping and provided further evidence that virtual environments are capable of reproducing much of the same hippocampal phenomenology that has been characterized using other methods (Harvey et al., 2009; Dombeck et al.”
Toward a science of computational ethology. (2014, neutral): “Automated and robotic systems have recently made their appearance (Reiser and Dickinson, 2008; Harvey et al., 2009; Albrecht and Bargmann, 2011), including closed-loop systems (Zabala et al.”