Cell Reports (Feb 2018)
An Excitatory Neural Assembly Encodes Short-Term Memory in the Prefrontal Cortex
- 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
Affiliations
- Yonglu Tian
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China; Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
- Chaojuan Yang
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
- Yaxuan Cui
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
- Feng Su
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China; School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
- Yongjie Wang
- Center for Mitochondrial Biology and Medicine, and Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of the Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province 710049, China; Department of Physiology, Institute of Neuroscience and Collaborative Innovation Center for Brain Science, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province 310058, China
- Yangzhen Wang
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China; School of Medicine, School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
- Peijiang Yuan
- School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
- Shujiang Shang
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
- Hao Li
- Department of Neurosurgery, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100050, China; China National Clinical Research Center for Neurological Diseases, Beijing 100050, China
- Jizong Zhao
- Department of Neurosurgery, Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100050, China; China National Clinical Research Center for Neurological Diseases, Beijing 100050, China
- Desheng Zhu
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
- Shiming Tang
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
- Peng Cao
- State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing 100101, China
- Yunbo Liu
- Institute of Laboratory Animal Science, Peking Union Medical College/Chinese Academy of Medical Science, Beijing 100021, China
- Xunli Wang
- Laboratory Animal Center, Fujian University of Tradition Chinese Medicine, Fuzhou, Fujian Province 350122, China
- Liecheng Wang
- Department of Physiology, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, Anhui Province 230032, China
- Wenbo Zeng
- State Key Laboratory of Virology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS, Wuhan, Hubei Province 430071, China
- Haifei Jiang
- State Key Laboratory of Virology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS, Wuhan, Hubei Province 430071, China
- Fei Zhao
- State Key Laboratory of Virology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS, Wuhan, Hubei Province 430071, China
- Minhua Luo
- State Key Laboratory of Virology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS, Wuhan, Hubei Province 430071, China
- Wei Xiong
- School of Medicine, School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
- Zilong Qiu
- CAS Key Laboratory of Primate Neurobiology, Institute of Neuroscience, CAS, Shanghai 200031, China; Corresponding author
- Xiang-Yao Li
- Department of Physiology, Institute of Neuroscience and Collaborative Innovation Center for Brain Science, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province 310058, China; Corresponding author
- Chen Zhang
- State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, School of Life Sciences and Key Laboratory for Neuroscience, Ministry of Education/National Health and Family Planning Commission, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China; Corresponding author
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2018.01.050
- Journal volume & issue
-
Vol. 22,
no. 7
pp. 1734 – 1744
Abstract
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.
Keywords
