The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Eyal Itskovits
Department of Genetics, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Ben Jerry Gonzales
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Hagit Turm
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Liz Izakson
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Doron Haritan
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Noa Bleistein
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Chen Cohen
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Ido Amit
Department of Immunology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Tal Shay
Department of Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Department of Biological Chemistry, Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; Child and Brain Development Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Canada
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.
