Functional imaging of hippocampal place cells at cellular resolution during virtual navigation

By D. Dombeck, Christopher D. Harvey, Lin Tian, L. Looger, David W. Tank. Nature Neuroscience, 2010

810 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spatial navigation is often used as a behavioral task in studies of the neuronal circuits that underlie cognition, learning and memory in rodents. The combination of in vivo microscopy with genetically encoded indicators has provided an important new tool for studying neuronal circuits, but has been technically difficult to apply during navigation. Here we describe methods for imaging the activity of neurons in the CA1 region of the hippocampus with subcellular resolution in behaving mice. Neurons that expressed the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP3 were imaged through a chronic hippocampal window. Head-restrained mice performed spatial behaviors in a setup combining a virtual reality system and a custom-built two-photon microscope. We optically identified populations of place cells and determined the correlation between the location of their place fields in the virtual environment and their anatomical location in the local circuit. The combination of virtual reality and high-resolution functional imaging should allow a new generation of studies to investigate neuronal circuit dynamics during behavior.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3b3f18cb47701e8b1ba64d5f1f2b88d2e67fb7d

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Citations in the corpus

Widespread State-Dependent Shifts in Cerebellar Activity in Locomoting Mice (2012, methodology): “Our imaging rates (35 ms/frame) and pixel resolution (,2 mm/ pixel) allowed artifacts due to brain motion to be corrected by a 2D cross-correlation-based algorithm as explained in detail previously [33,37].”
Critical role of soluble amyloid-β for early hippocampal hyperactivity in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (2012, background): “Inspired by the finding that the hippocampus can be exposed by suction removal of overlying cortex (14), recent reports have demonstrated that two-photon imaging of the hippocampus in vivo, allowing detailed studies with single-cell resolution, is feasible (15, 16).”
Sequential and efficient neural-population coding of complex task information (2019, positive): “Water-restricted mice were trained in a head-fixed virtual reality system (Dombeck et al., 2010) to navigate in a T-maze.”
The Role of Hippocampal Replay in Memory and Planning (2018, background): “The increasing availability of two-photon calcium imaging coupled with rodent virtual reality now means that activity of hundreds of cells can be monitored across days, while animals perform spatial tasks [151].”
In vivo three-photon microscopy of subcortical structures within an intact mouse brain (2012, neutral): “cells in their natural environment as well as their responses to systematic manipulations 3,13 .”
Functional Imaging of Dentate Granule Cells in the Adult Mouse Hippocampus (2016, positive): “To provide optical access to the hippocampus for in vivo imaging, we locally removed overlying cortical tissue by aspiration and subsequently implanted a chronic window (Mizrahi et al., 2004; Dombeck et al., 2010; Gu et al., 2014).”
Sequence Learning and the Role of the Hippocampus in Rodent Navigation (2012, neutral): “However, with recent advances in recording technology [84] and the ability to stimulate neural activity [85], these issues are likely to be addressed.”
The restless engram: consolidations never end. (2012, background): “Thus the same spatial environment can recruit a different population of cells in different individuals and the same individual can represent different environments with different subpopulations of cells (Redish et al., 2001; Dombeck et al., 2010).”
The molecular and systems biology of memory. (2014, positive): “Thus the same spatial environment can recruit a different population of cells in different individuals and the same individual can represent different environments with different subpopulations of cells (Redish et al., 2001; Dombeck et al., 2010).”
Computational Implications of Biophysical Diversity and Multiple Timescales in Neurons and Synapses for Circuit Performance (2016, background): “Despite this spatial precision, the temporal firing pattern is not nearly as reliable [86,87].”
NMDA receptor-dependent multidendrite Ca(2+) spikes required for hippocampal burst firing in vivo. (2014, positive): “Furthermore, even theta oscillations and place cell activity, requiring an intact hippocampal circuitry, were not affected by such cortical windows (Dombeck et al., 2010).”