Medial entorhinal cortex activates in a traveling wave in the rat

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Traveling waves are hypothesized to support the long-range coordination of anatomically distributed circuits. Whether separate strongly-interacting circuits exhibit traveling waves remains unknown. The hippocampus exhibits traveling 'theta' waves and interacts strongly with the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). To determine whether the MEC also activates in a traveling wave, we performed extracellular recordings of LFP and multi-unit activity along the MEC. These recordings revealed progressive phase shifts in activity, indicating that the MEC also activates in a traveling wave. Variation in theta waveform along the region, generated by gradients in local physiology, contributed to the observed phase shifts. Removing waveform-related phase shifts left significant residual phase shifts. The residual phase shifts covaried with theta frequency in a manner consistent with those generated by weakly coupled oscillators. These results show that coordination of anatomically distributed circuits could be enabled by traveling waves but reveal heterogeneity in the mechanisms generating those waves.

Data availability

Data files have bee be uploaded to crcns.org http://dx.doi.org/10.6080/K0C53J2R

The following data sets were generated

(2020) Extracellular recordings from across the dorsoventral axis of the medial entorhinal cortex of the rat
Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience, http://dx.doi.org/10.6080/K0C53J2R.

http://crcns.org/data-sets/hc/hc-27

Article and author information

Author details

Jesus J Hernández-Pérez

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, United States

For correspondence
jjhern@iu.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6963-4712
Keiland W Cooper

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0358-9645
Ehren L Newman

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Whitehall Foundation

Ehren L Newman

Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (232364)

Jesus J Hernández-Pérez

Indiana University Bloomington

Ehren L Newman

The funders provided resources for the study design, data collection, and interpretation.

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 (#18-026) of Indiana University, Bloomington. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of Indiana University, Bloomington (Animal Welfare Assurance Number D16-00587). All surgery was performed under isoflurane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.

Copyright

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.