An Excitatory Neural Assembly Encodes Short-Term Memory in the Prefrontal Cortex

• Main Authors: Yonglu Tian, Chaojuan Yang, Yaxuan Cui, Feng Su, Yongjie Wang, Yangzhen Wang, Peijiang Yuan, Shujiang Shang, Hao Li, Jizong Zhao, Desheng Zhu, Shiming Tang, Peng Cao, Yunbo Liu, Xunli Wang, Liecheng Wang, Wenbo Zeng, Haifei Jiang, Fei Zhao, Minhua Luo, Wei Xiong, Zilong Qiu, Xiang-Yao Li, Chen Zhang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2018-02-01
• Series: Cell Reports
• Subjects: short-term memory; prefrontal cortex; microcircuitry; Alzheimer’s disease
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124718300822

Summary: Short-term memory (STM) is crucial for animals to hold information for a small period of time. Persistent or recurrent neural activity, together with neural oscillations, is known to encode the STM at the cellular level. However, the coding mechanisms at the microcircuitry level remain a mystery. Here, we performed two-photon imaging on behaving mice to monitor the activity of neuronal microcircuitry. We discovered a neuronal subpopulation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that exhibited emergent properties in a context-dependent manner underlying a STM-like behavior paradigm. These neuronal subpopulations exclusively comprise excitatory neurons and mainly represent a group of neurons with stronger functional connections. Microcircuitry plasticity was maintained for minutes and was absent in an animal model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Thus, these results point to a functional coding mechanism that relies on the emergent behavior of a functionally defined neuronal assembly to encode STM.