Distinct Contribution of Adult-Born Hippocampal Granule Cells to Context Encoding

By Nathan B Danielson, P. Kaifosh, Jeffrey D. Zaremba, Matthew Lovett-Barron, J. Tsai, C. Denny, E. Balough, A. R. Goldberg, L. Drew, R. Hen and 2 more. 2016

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY Adult-born granule cells (abGCs) have been implicated in cognition and mood; however, it remains unknown how these cells behave in vivo. Here, we have used two-photon calcium imaging to monitor the activity of young abGCs in awake behaving mice. We find that young adult-born neurons fire at a higher rate in vivo but paradoxically exhibit less spatial tuning than their mature counterparts. When presented with different contexts, mature granule cells underwent robust remapping of their spatial representations, and the few spatially tuned adult-born cells remapped to a similar degree. We next used optogenetic silencing to confirm the direct involvement of abGCs in context encoding and discrimination, consistent with their proposed role in pattern separation. These results provide the first in vivo characterization of abGCs and reveal their participation in the encoding of novel information.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, positive): “Adult-born granule cells have also been implicated in contextual discrimination (Sahay et al., 2011; Nakashiba et al., 2012; Danielson et al., 2016), a result that parallels recent findings that suggest that adult neurogenesis facilitates pattern decorrelation in the olfactory bulb (Li et al.”
Dendrites of dentate gyrus granule cells contribute to pattern separation by controlling sparsity (2016, methodology): “Experimental studies have shown that only a small population of GCs, 5%, are active in a single context (Marrone et al., 2011; Satvat et al., 2011; Danielson et al., 2016), a phenomenon termed sparse coding (Olshausen and Field, 2004).”
The role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in brain health and disease (2018, background): “A role for adult-born neurons in such “behavioral pattern separation” has been demonstrated by knocking down neurogenesis and assessing the ability to distinguish similar fear conditioning contexts [43, 61, 62], nearby locations on a radial arm maze [63], and object-location pairings [64].”
Physiological properties and behavioral correlates of hippocampal granule cells and mossy cells (2017, positive): “Our findings are in agreement with those of others that show that the majority of granule cells are silent during waking (Jung and McNaughton, 1993; Gothard et al., 2001; Neunuebel and Knierim, 2012, 2014; Danielson et al., 2016; Diamantaki et al., 2016).”
Spatial representations of granule cells and mossy cells of the dentate gyrus (2017, background): “…a very sparse coding scheme and multiple lines of evidence for sparse granule cell activity that have more recently emerged (Alme et al., 2010; Danielson et al., 2016; Chawla et al., 2005; Neunuebel and Knierim, 2012; Diamantaki et al., 2016a, 2016b; see also Jung and McNaughton, 1993; Skaggs…”
Pattern separation in the hippocampus through the eyes of computational modeling (2017, background): “…this task as they are significantly more numerous compared to EC and CA3 principal cells (Amaral, Ishizuka, & Claiborne, 1990), they fire sparsely (Danielson et al., 2016; Jung & McNaughton, 1993; Leutgeb et al., 2007), they form few but strong synapses on CA3 pyramidal cells (Rollenhagen et al.,…”
Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus: From Stem Cells to Behavior. (2016, positive): “The DG is an area of the brain characterized by a large, dense population of glutamatergic granule cells with very sparse activity (Chawla et al., 2005; Danielson et al., 2016; Jung and McNaughton, 1993).”
Sparse activity of identified dentate granule cells during spatial exploration (2016, background): “…in Figure 3, in the majority of cases firing occurred at single spatial locations (8 out of 11 recordings; Figure 3—figure supplement 1; see details in Materials and methods), suggesting that these spatial firing patterns are likely to arise from the mature GC population (Danielson et al., 2016).”