Salient experiences are represented by unique transcriptional signatures in the mouse brain
- The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
- Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
- Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
It is well established that inducible transcription is essential for the consolidation of salient experiences into long-term memory. However, whether inducible transcription relays information about the identity and affective attributes of the experience being encoded, has not been explored. To this end, we analyzed transcription induced by a variety of rewarding and aversive experiences, across multiple brain regions. Our results describe the existence of robust transcriptional signatures uniquely representing distinct experiences, enabling near-perfect decoding of recent experiences. Furthermore, experiences with shared attributes display commonalities in their transcriptional signatures, exemplified in the representation of valence, habituation and reinforcement. This study introduces the concept of a neural transcriptional code, which represents the encoding of experiences in the mouse brain. This code is comprised of distinct transcriptional signatures that correlate to attributes of the experiences that are being committed to long-term memory.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Israel Science Foundation (Personal Grant 393/12 & I-CORE 1796/12)
- Ami Citri
The Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship (Postdoctoral stipend)
- Bogna Marta Ignatowska-Jankowska
German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (Young Investigator Award 2299-2291.1./2011)
- Ami Citri
Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (Young Investigator Award #18795)
- Ami Citri
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Research Support)
- Ami Citri
Binational United-States Israel Research Foundation (Research Grant #2011266)
- Ami Citri
Milton Rosenbaum Research Foundation (Research Grant)
- Ami Citri
National Institutes for Psychobiology in Israel (Research Grant 109-15-16)
- Ami Citri
Shimon Peres Postdoctoral Award (Postdoctoral stipend)
- Bogna Marta Ignatowska-Jankowska
ELSC Postdoctoral Award (Postdoctoral stipend)
- Bogna Marta Ignatowska-Jankowska
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#NS-13-13895-3 ; NS-15-14668-3 ; NS-14-14088-3 ; NS-15-14312-3 ; NS-15-14348-3) of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the Hebrew University. Every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Reviewing Editor
- Sacha B Nelson, Brandeis University, United States
Version history
- Received: September 4, 2017
- Accepted: February 5, 2018
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 7, 2018 (version 1)
- Accepted Manuscript updated: February 22, 2018 (version 2)
- Version of Record published: March 21, 2018 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2018, Mukherjee et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 6,717
- Page views
-
- 1,038
- Downloads
-
- 24
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, Scopus, PubMed Central.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Salient experiences are represented by unique transcriptional signatures in the mouse brain
eLife 7:e31220.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31220
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often display atypical learning styles; however, little is known regarding learning-related brain plasticity and its relation to clinical phenotypic features. Here, we investigate cognitive learning and neural plasticity using functional brain imaging and a novel numerical problem-solving training protocol. Children with ASD showed comparable learning relative to typically developing children but were less likely to shift from rule-based to memory-based strategy. While learning gains in typically developing children were associated with greater plasticity of neural representations in the medial temporal lobe and intraparietal sulcus, learning in children with ASD was associated with more stable neural representations. Crucially, the relation between learning and plasticity of neural representations was moderated by insistence on sameness, a core phenotypic feature of ASD. Our study uncovers atypical cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying learning in children with ASD, and informs pedagogical strategies for nurturing cognitive abilities in childhood autism.
-
- Neuroscience
The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a retinotopic relay center where visual inputs from the retina are processed and relayed to the visual cortex, has been proposed as a potential target for artificial vision. At present, it is unknown whether optogenetic LGN stimulation is sufficient to elicit behaviorally relevant percepts, and the properties of LGN neural responses relevant for artificial vision have not been thoroughly characterized. Here, we demonstrate that tree shrews pretrained on a visual detection task can detect optogenetic LGN activation using an AAV2-CamKIIα-ChR2 construct and readily generalize from visual to optogenetic detection. Simultaneous recordings of LGN spiking activity and primary visual cortex (V1) local field potentials (LFP) during optogenetic LGN stimulation show that LGN neurons reliably follow optogenetic stimulation at frequencies up to 60 Hz, and uncovered a striking phase locking between the V1 local field potential (LFP) and the evoked spiking activity in LGN. These phase relationships were maintained over a broad range of LGN stimulation frequencies, up to 80 Hz, with spike field coherence values favoring higher frequencies, indicating the ability to relay temporally precise information to V1 using light activation of the LGN. Finally, V1 LFP responses showed sensitivity values to LGN optogenetic activation that were similar to the animal's behavioral performance. Taken together, our findings confirm the LGN as a potential target for visual prosthetics in a highly visual mammal closely related to primates.
