SPACEBRAIN – Structure-Function Relationship in Rodent Presubiculum
How do we know where we are and where we are going? Our sense of orientation in an environment relies on cells and circuits in specialized brain areas, in particular the hippocampus and the parahippocampal region. Despite formidable recent insight into the organization of place cells, grid cells and head direction cells, we are still far from understanding the exact structural and functional elements of their organization. Indeed there is a wealth of data describing neuronal firing in relation to exploratory behaviour, but only rarely the mechanisms responsible for such activity have been investigated. Our collaborative project will focus on the presubiculum. This brain area contains neurons coding for head direction. Approximately fifty percent of presubicular neurons are Head Direction cells, signalling the direction pointed by the animal at any moment. The presubiculum provides a crucial gate for directionality signals reaching the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus: it is important for the synaptic activation of entorhinal cortex (Kononenko and Witter 2012; Rowland et al. 2013), for the functional grid cell signal (Winter et al. 2015), and the coherence and visual landmark anchoring of place cells (Calton et al. 2003). This collaborative PROCOPE-DAAD project between Prof. Brecht and Dr. Fricker will focus on cb+ and cb- neurons of presubicular layer II, from the fine circuit properties to function during behaviour.
Financer
Duration of project
Start date: 01/2017
End date: 12/2018
Research Areas
Research Areas